I vow to taste the truth of the Tataka toast first. Let's say our names. Just the first names. Aaron. Jerome. How are people feeling? Is it stuffy? Are you hot? Are you cold? Once more? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Last week we began to sort of bake. You brought something to class? Egyptian women cover up. To make an image. And how does that make an image? It protects them from flirtation. But this is part of the Muslim code of behavior.

[01:05]

Under sadat. And the women were starting to wear it. Judith brought this to me. Actually I forgot to bring it last week. This is Women Priests. It's a play about a nun who wants to be able to become a priest, I guess. With Ellen Burstein, who I really like a lot. It's on Broadway. Some of you might have seen this. What's the name of the play? What is it, Judith? Sacrilege. It's called Sacrilege. It stars Ellen Burstein as the nun. One thing that was sort of interesting was that young girls can be altar creatures now.

[02:09]

Altar creatures? Altar creatures. In the play or in real life? Say what? In real life. I wanted to assign for next week an Arhat to those of you who want to do a little reporting. Let's see, where's my list? How many of you got your books that you ordered? How many of you still need to get your books? Is everybody? Does anyone else want a copy of the Chalice and the Blade? Have you gotten one? We can order some more if that's what everyone wants. Is there one on dessert? Over here? I don't know.

[03:11]

There's about 39 names of these women Arhats that we're going to chant. Actually, we could chant them tonight, but I thought after we read some of their poems. So I thought, I don't know how many there are of us, but we could maybe each take one. Do you think everybody could have access to... Is it that first one? Yeah, that red book, this one, the first Buddhist woman. It's on reserve, and a number of people have them. You can trade them around. They're short, little biographies, and the poems are short. They're little verses, pretty much. So, we've already talked about Mahapajapati. Should we just assign each person to take one? Do you want to write this down, who you're going to get? Okay. Are you ready, Erin? You have Mita. Yasodhara.

[04:19]

Tissa. T-I-S-S-A. Alexumana. Tom. Upasama. U-P-A-S-A-M-A. Suzanne Visaka. Or Visaka. V-I-S-A-K-H-A. Christina Kema. K-H-E-M-A. K-H-E-M-A. Paula Upalavana. Yeah. Sudarinanda. That's Sudaridashnanda. Linda Vadesi. V-A-D-D-H-E-S-I. V-A-D-D-H-E-S-I. Uh-huh, V as in Victor, yeah. Arlene Patakara. Mary?

[05:25]

C-A-R-A. Utama. U-T-T-A-M-A. Is this still the same? No, this is Mary. Leslie, you get Bada. This is two words. Bada, B-H-A-D-D-A. Bada. And second word is Kundalakesa. K-U-N. And I'll just, I'll copy it. Oh, you've got the signature. Okay. So, Susan Nandutara. Okay. Okay, Judith Dantika. D-A-N-T-I-K-A. See, somebody will be as familiar as, you know, Butsudanandaidai. Okay, Nandutara Dantika. Gabriel Sakuka. S-A-K-U-K-A. Ramon Sija.

[06:27]

S-I-H-A. Now, this is a second utama. You're just sitting in. You don't want it in a siren. No, thanks. All right. There's two utamas. Who got that first utama? I did. Biryam and Lee. So, why don't you, I'm not sure where they fit in. But they do figure in the book. Why don't you take the one, the earliest one that comes about, and you take the second one, okay? Damadina. Damadina. Okay. How about back here? Ready? Kisagotami. K-I-S-A-G-O-T-A-M-I. Kisagotami. Vasetti. V-A-S-E-T-T-H-I. Where am I going? Soni, did you get one? Ubiri. U-double-B-I-R-I.

[07:29]

And, Jeanette, this is another patakara, but it's different. It's patakarapankasata. Patakara-pankasata. Good. Okay, Katie Isadasi. Can you spell it? I-S-A-D-A-S-I. Badakapilani. D-H-A-D... Is that Mike or me? That's Mike. Oh, wait a minute. Yeah, that's Mike. And Mary will get the next one. So, B-H-A-D-D-A, and second word, kapilani, K-A-P-I-L-A-N-I. And, Mary, why don't you take mutta? Mutta, M-U-T-T-A. And, David, how about kappa? C-A-P-A. And, is that it?

[08:32]

Easy one to spell. Okay, and there's more, and maybe I'll pull out one for myself out of this group. And I actually, some of these have much longer stories. I know that Pattakara has a very long and drawn-out story, so if your story's biography is kind of long, just, you know, distill it and just tell it, and then recite the poems, and we'll do that next week and then we'll chant it, okay? So, tonight, there's some material that I want to bring up that's maybe difficult, difficult to hear and difficult to feel what comes up when you hear certain things, so I thought we could all just kind of get ready for that and be aware of what comes up. I'm going to read various things,

[09:35]

and for the class today, I wanted to talk about the positive and negative images of women in early Buddhism and later on in Mahayana, and then get into the basic core teachings of Buddhism and how they, and how the how these are, can be viewed as not being gender-specific, being non-gender-specific teachings in terms of hierarchy and things. So that's what I had set out for tonight, and we'll see how we go here. So there's this definition

[10:36]

of feminism, which I found very interesting. It's the radical practice of the co-humanity of women and men, and radical meaning going to the root of things, what radical means. So this co-humanity, remember we talked about androcentrism as being the male is seen as the norm, the human, as the norm, and then humanity is kind of collapsed into maleness as being the normal, and then femaleness is other and is marginalized and seen as something kind of an appendix or tacked on. And this comes up in institutions and scholarship, and we kind of went over this material. So feminism, as a definition, is the radical practice of the co-humanity of women and men, and so this equal,

[11:36]

which seems very appropriate for Buddhism. So in early Indian Buddhism, what we find in Buddhism is that there are both positive and negative images. We can't, you know, in some way there's a kind of romantic idea in some things that you read that the Buddha was very egalitarian and allowed women to be ordained and spoke, which we can read again that yes, women can attain the highest spiritual paths and so forth. This is definitely there, and there's a tendency to want to romanticize this, but actually it's a mixed, the history of Buddhism has a mixed image. It's not just that women are seen as having the same

[12:38]

spiritual capacities as men. So, but we're very lucky to have this Terigata, the Psalms of the Sisters. It's sometimes translated as these poems from these early women arhats that we're going to do next week. This was, these were written in about the 3rd century B.C., and the Buddha lived in 500 B.C., died in, what, 480, 460. So these were oral, and then they were written down. So we have those. And then the Upadana that I quoted from last week, Gotami's story, was written in about the 1st century A.D. So this is also still pretty early. And that was, these biographies were also very positive and showed the power. They were written by women, it seems.

[13:38]

So this was a positive part of the canon, the things that were written down and remembered. But after that, there was commentary that was made on these things that came later, about 1500 years later. And the Upadana, this is a little bit review, had both nuns' and monks' biographies, stories in verse. And the nuns was just forgotten totally on that commentary. In one commentary, they weren't mentioned at all. And in another one, they were just noted as a kind of footnote. So later on, this began to change. the, this voice was lost. And then the scholarship, the Western scholarship went along with that. It's just now

[14:41]

being translated. And all the rest of the Pali canon has been translated for a long time. So, so in this early some of the images of the, in the sutras, one sutra in particular, the Aghutaranikaya, Aghutaranikaya, puts in the Buddha's mouth as saying, let's see, here we go, I should just say that in the culture, there are stereotypes in the Indian culture of women. Women were seen as temptresses, having sexual appetites that could never be

[15:41]

met, always wanting to be pregnant. These were certain stereotypes and motifs of the culture of the time. And so then you have Buddha saying, let's see, where is this quote? It is impossible, monks, it cannot come to pass that a woman should be an arhat, who is a fully enlightened one. Now, this is in direct opposition to the other quotes we have of the Buddha when he spoke with Ananda when Ananda pressed him, you know, can women attain the highest, you know, and he said, yes, they can. Well then, why don't you let them join the order? So later on, you have the Buddha, oh, that's too bad, I'll find it, saying that women cannot, you know. Also, this was also put

[16:43]

into the Buddha's mouth, women folk are uncontrollable, envious, greedy, weak in wisdom. A woman's heart is haunted by stinginess, jealousy, and sensuality. That's also from this Aguttara Nikaya Sutra. So, so, just feel what that feels like. Also, women were, this began to be part of the teaching that women could not become, be Buddhas or Arhats. And it's because they couldn't fill these five stations in life. And the five stations included being a king

[17:43]

and various things that in the social world women were not allowed to do. So that, what was happening in the culture was then mapped onto the spiritual life and they couldn't become Buddhas because they couldn't do these things that were in the culture, not open to them. See how those two work together. Also, around this time, the, they began to bring up past lives that you, a Buddha couldn't be female and also some, somewhere in their past lives it was necessary to become a male. I mean, you could be a female but you had to become a male in order to be a Buddha. So, female incarnation was very, thought of as very unfortunate. Now, you can, this, you can look at it in various ways. One way is that that's a very

[18:43]

misogynist view meaning hatred of women. Another way to look at this is that at that time it was very unfortunate to be a woman. So, unfortunate meaning the circumstances of their lives were very difficult. Not, you know, they were under the three, they had to be under their fathers auspices, then their husbands and then their sons. So, you were always limited your freedom by, by this male dominance. Just the fact of pregnancy and birth and health situation, it was difficult, life was difficult. So, on the one hand, this was, this could be misused and on the other hand you could see it as a way of

[19:47]

feeling compassion for people that next time they wouldn't have to go through all this difficulty. I think from our point of view it's kind of hard to reconcile that, but Rita Gross really brings that up strongly. She's very careful about the word misogynist rather than hatred of women in terms of this female rebirth. She's, I think, rather calmly looking at it in another, in a deeper way. It seems like she's generous. Very generous. She is generous. Some of the woes for women where they had to leave family at a young age, I think they had to go to their husband's home. You know, when the Buddha's mother had her, she wanted to have her baby at her parents' home and she left, you know, to make that walk and ended up having the Buddha at, Buddha was born

[20:48]

in Lumbini. So she was on her way home to have the baby. So you had to leave your home and your family and go off to your husband's home. That was one of the woes, leaving it, and I think women were married at a pretty young age. And they had to be subservient and pregnancy and childbirth and so forth. You know, these were difficult. Yes? Can you tell us why was he born out of her side? Why not just a regular? Is there any explanation why not a regular? Yeah, well, I think in these hagiographies, these biographies of sort of special beings, there's always something around, there's a miracle around the birth, like Jesus. And if you, if you read, there's some signs or a dream or something special. So I think it has to do with that. Yeah.

[21:49]

Does anyone have any other sense about that motif, being born out of the side? I thought there were always the parallel, there was sort of the mythical and then also the real birth of the Buddha. I remember reading that the mythical one where he was born out of his mother's side actually came quite later. Yeah. Long after he had died. He was being more mythologized and everything. Right. And I think that's what happens with these great teachers. And the same with Jesus. I mean, I think, well, it's hard to say. But, I mean, it's a matter of belief in... Christina? Well, I think it has to do with the double nature that it's not only a human. I mean, it's not a human in the regular form only. That is special ways of getting born. Just pointing out that double nature that we have when we're

[22:51]

kind of regular and then we have Buddha nature or we have God's nature in us too and still we're kind of found in this conditioned world. So, I think that's what they tried to point out. Yeah. So, so this Indian stereotype of women as the temptress, foolish, jealous, the sexual appetite and so forth. Then you have this juxtapose, this whole something that one would grow up with as an Indian person in the culture which was patriarchal and then you have monks, as Dr. Kansa said, celibate monks in hot countries, young celibate monks in hot countries and so there's some, if you're not working with this you may

[23:51]

with the difficulties that you're having practice difficulties in terms of your own sexuality then it's very easy to project that out and say it's the women's fault, they're doing it, they're tempting me, they're, let's see if I've got this one to read to you. Now this is very frequently quoted but how are we to conduct ourselves Lord with regard to womankind as not seeing them Ananda but if we should see them what are we to do? No talking Ananda but if they should speak to us Lord what are we to do? Keep wide awake Ananda. Now this particular dialogue it's actually I don't see it as so misogynist necessarily but this one how about this? Monks a woman even when going along

[24:54]

will stop to ensnare the heart of a man whether standing sitting or lying down laughing talking or singing weeping stricken or dying or dying a woman will stop to ensnare the heart of a man Who said that? This is from Aguttara the same sutra and it's quoted from an article called Temptress, Housewife, and Nun This is the Buddha This is the Buddha from the Aguttara Nikaya It's a very dedicated focused single-minded practice Yes How about this? Just another one just so you kind of get the feeling of this The Buddha states that nothing is so alluring and so tempting so disruptive and such a hindrance to winning peace as the form of a woman that verily

[25:55]

one may say of womanhood that it is wholly a snare of Mara Mara is the evil one So you know it's pretty unrelentingly you can find I should say pretty unrelentingly that I feel is misogynist I guess I'd say seeing women as or anything feminine as wholly evil wholly a snare of Mara That was would that have been translated from the Pali? Yes By Well all those early translators Rize Davis Anyway this was all translated Now another thing which is very traditional is to meditate on the foulness

[26:56]

of the human body you know those going to the charnel grounds going to cemeteries and as a way of loosening one's hold on clinging to the self clinging to the body so you you meditate on a corpse and how it changes and dissolves and does what it does in this process and also and this foulness of the body is not there are various this is this is a counter this is a balance these meditations on the foulness of the body do not specify women's bodies they you go through some of you are familiar with this you go through all the different liquids in the body and you know hair phlegm teeth this and that the other and you and you imagine that you know the body is thought of as a bag tied at the top

[27:56]

and tied at the bottom filled with all sorts of foul things you know these are very traditional meditations and they're not just about women's bodies they're just about human body so that's in terms of what we were saying a couple weeks ago about the meditation instructions for the nuns were were the same as for the men so they weren't given inferior meditational instructions it was more the institutions that um the institutionalized um having uh the eight special rules and having to be subservient to the men that that had some effect on how the order went in terms of them not becoming great teachers and not receiving lots of donations and that kind of thing but the meditation instruction was the same so this particular meditation instruction can be

[28:58]

used for men or women so these are just a few and there's a lot I mean you can find these where women are seen as the temptress and those kinds of things but there are also positive images this is all early Buddhism um Who wrote the Pali Canon? Well it was all oral you know and and all the sutras start out with thus I have heard and it's Ananda who was there for all of the Buddhist teaching supposedly recited all these teachings so he recited so it's really third and beyond hand information oh it's it's way beyond that I mean it was all oral and recited and 500 years after yeah some of these things were written down much later so it

[29:58]

would be written by the people in their time yes so there's positive images of women also so it's this balance you can find both and the positive images are um well one of the main positive images that you find is the lay woman donor uh the the donors were very important the laity was very important to both orders the monks and the nuns because you would go to beg so you needed the laity to feed you and also to give you your requisites your robes and needle and medicines and put you up during the rainy season so you often um can read where they're staying at somebody's estate I don't know what they call it but somebody puts them up you know a whole bunch of people anyway um there are very positive um

[31:00]

lay women donors that are brought up and there's also some nuns um this one nun um let's see what her name is oh um lion yawn her name is lion yawn she's in the avatamsaka sutra and she's a nun she's a fully ordained nun and she teaches um the young monk I think it is who comes and she sends after teaching him fully she sends him out to another woman teacher this is in the avatamsaka sutra so that can be found there's also a lay woman named uh vish vishaka I think and one of you got that name I don't think it's the same one and she um she's supposed to be extremely beautiful and you know in terms of the stereotype um she gets

[32:00]

a lot of coverage this particular beautiful lay woman donor um she's very wealthy and she's very close to the buddha she has access she can come and talk with him about various things very easily you know it rings true in a certain way sometimes major donors get um access to the teachers and all because they really are supporting the um the monastery or something so anyway this particular lay woman is written about let's see so there was a indian early indian buddhism which isn't really Theravada Theravada was just one of the many schools but their canon was kept it was not destroyed we don't have the writings from the other schools but anyway in the when Mahayana began to be um developed they were there wasn't that much

[33:01]

difference between the hinayana between the um well I use hinayana just as a designation not derogatorily but the early buddhists and the mahayana all lived together in the same monasteries but there was this change the beginning of women's spiritual capacities where you don't really find that in the early indian writings let's see

[34:01]

um now here's something that's um that the buddhists said um monks this is a corrective monks among these some women disciples are stream winners some once returners some non returners not fruitless monks are all these women disciples who have met their end and be it women be it man for whom such chariot doth wait by that same car into nirvana's presence shall they come so these are also things that were recorded and remembered so it's this you can find both so in the mahayana there began to be

[35:01]

these not so much historical non people non figures that we can name like in the teragatha where we actually have names and biographies but um mythic figures more mythic figures for example um prajnaparamita that we I sent that picture around you saw that last week um prajnaparamita is a is a more of a mythic figure there's not a historical prajnaparamita this is the perfection of wisdom personified this is a mahayana um creation you might say and also kuan yin the um personification of compassion in indian buddhism it was avalokiteshvara the male compassionate personification and the mahayana when it went into china um it became this compassionate

[36:01]

figure changed into a female figure kuan yin and in japan also kan ze on or kan on we chant you know the um kan ze on namu butsu yo that's kuan yin or the the female version of avalokiteshvara the compassionate one so this is the mahayana these mythic figures and then there were also you can find in the sutras for example in the lotus sutra the women were used as a motif i guess you could say a literary motif to to kind of show up and contrast the um stuckness or conservative stuckness of early indian or the hindayana you might say early indian buddhists so you have in the lotus sutra this the naga princess do you know about the naga princess it's an eight year old girl who was um

[37:01]

she came to the assembly and shariputra was there and the buddha and she speaks the dharma beautifully and it's like sort of like let's see if i quoted this um i have so many notes here i hope i can find everything i want naga in the lotus sutra naga well anyway i don't have the page number but shariputra challenges her because she's a woman and also she's eight years old you know and she um speaks the dharma very eloquently and she also does this thing which is a motif that comes up which is she does this sex change she turns into a male to show him see she she didn't need to be a male in order to speak the dharma eloquently and beautifully she shows him that she can that she's not attached to her femaleness that she's able to switch and shariputra you know this kind of a magical

[38:04]

thing that she can do um so this shows her abilities to kind of um not be attached to female um femaleness or maleness the dharma as they say is neither male nor female so this is a demonstration of it and he's totally you know taken aback the same thing happens in the vimalakirti sutra which some of you might be familiar with where there's a goddess uh figure who also speaks the dharma and it's probably shariputra i think shariputra was one of these arhats one of the foremost in um um let's see foremost in wisdom i think was shariputra so he's used as a kind of fall guy in the mahayana because he was an arhat uh and you know in the touted as being this one of wisdom one of that understands everything and then in

[39:05]

the mahayana they say but you don't understand emptiness and the perfection of wisdom and then they proceed to have and be the straight man for these various teachings and shariputra in the vimalakirti sutra we saw this in acted i don't know if any of you saw the play it's um patty schneider um had this vision actually when she heard robert thurman talk about the vimalakirti sutra this this scene where the goddess she switches she does a sex change as well she switches with shariputra that's what she does and turns into shariputra and he's the goddess anyway there it's done with these big masks and kind of like life size puppets and shariputra is kind of like whoa the puppet's anyway this um this motif of making the sex change is it's kind of hard a little bit to swallow you know but i think it's important and rita gross

[40:05]

goes into this at length um that these women who do this are fully they're already um fully capable of speaking the dharma um and have you know accomplished what they set out to accomplish if we're talking about accomplishing they have understood so thoroughly that they can do these things without attachment that's what it's it's using that um to show how people are stuck in in their ideas of especially that women are can't can't be buddhists you know can't understand in fact there's quotes where it says women can't even have bodhicitta which is the thought of enlightenment they're not capable of that even so these kinds of sutras totally counter those um beliefs of um that were rampant really yes

[41:06]

does it ever go into like exactly why do they ever enumerate like the reasons why women aren't able to like some specific thing or is it always just kind of a general the fact that they're women yeah is it usually just kind of a general or i think it was some of these things that i read before that women are the belief is that their essence you know which is also so counter to um our buddhist understanding but anyway that their essence in and of itself is not it's filled with jealousy and insatiable this and that so therefore um they they don't have the capacity what's interesting is that all these kinds of views are fly in the face of the buddhist teaching the core teachings that's what that's what it is that's right yeah that's right so you have the neutral gender

[42:07]

teachings of emptiness and the dharma and buddha nature and the sixth realms you know you have the sixth realms which are hungry ghosts fighting gods the asuras the heavenly realm animal realm hells and the human realm there isn't as rita gross says a seventh realm called women you know just the human realm and in the human realm to for half of that realm to designate the other half as not being able so so you take androcentric societies that let's see the buddhist teaching itself stands beautifully actually these core teachings

[43:08]

but the history is that you have androcentric societies patriarchal societies that based on gender privilege and gender hierarchy and habit and ego clinging and all sorts of other things cannot make that shift you know we saw that in the nun's order and how the one thing that remained the same was these gender set up rather than and everything else everything else shifted but that is very tenacious stuff and so you know this book is called buddhism after patriarchy so she's kind of challenging how do we get back to the core you know these core teachings even in the face of long long cultural

[44:08]

thing now there's also a belief that karmically you know this female rebirth that karmically speaking it's an unfavorable birth to be born as a woman and then but the justification for that is they say see all the difficulty that you're having that shows that this that's your karma the truth of the teaching of karma is then used to perpetuate the ongoing misery or difficulties because it's like blaming the victim you know rather than here's someone who's suffering and trying to alleviate that suffering by changing the institutions making it more accessible to have you know access to spiritual life and so on and so forth or to follow one's way instead those are perpetuated and then used as a reason that that you shouldn't that it is unfavorable to have a

[45:08]

female rebirth and it's your fault so this is so karma is one of the only teachings of in terms of core teachings that has been used to justify the gender based differences that's one and also there's this side that when talking about female rebirth is an unfavorable birth that there's some truth to that it was difficult so wanting someone not to take rebirth in a female body was maybe wishing them well you might want someone you love not to have to go through that again so there's that side of it as well yeah

[46:13]

the nuns the monks the laymen and the laywomen this is in Mahayana sutras it's there's also the son and daughter you know we'll also say the sons and the daughters excuse me or the good daughter or the good son and also the idea of the good friend Kalyanamitra is male and female so there's there's these positive images of inclusiveness in the Mahayana that begins to come let's see here I kept so many notes I don't want to skip anything oh here's something very interesting one of the other reasons why women couldn't become buddhists is because you need the 32 marks of a buddha and the 32 marks include all sorts of special signs you know the buddha has webbed fingers and wheels on his palms and

[47:43]

feet have you seen that in statues and things and one of the other things that one of the 32 marks is that the buddha has a sheathed penis this is one of the marks well no to there's some feeling that that was supposed to be I guess in terms of Reb's lecture that sexuality one doesn't use sexuality to those of you who weren't at Reb's lecture on Sunday I don't know were you anyway talking about sexuality and the practice around that not misusing sexuality anyway so to have a sheathed penis with a might be some way of talking about she says asexuality but Rita Gross does but somehow not using that in the world

[48:43]

in the usual ways that people are prone to but then that so that's one of the marks you know but then that was used to say you know women are not they can never be Buddhists because you gotta have the 32 marks and there you go of course she says she says well if you that means really that no man can become a Buddha either because certainly they don't have sheathed penises and maybe women are closer to having a sheathed penis than a man but anyway so that shows the kind of lengths to which you can take these things to prove you know that women are not allowed to you know kept up so it's kind of it's it's absurd kind of to use that yes who is it that said those were the marks of a Buddha the 32 marks where does that come from I don't know which sutra but it's it's in the sutras but that's that's what Buddha said right the sutras are the things that Buddha said so Buddha's

[49:43]

making a statement about himself yeah yeah well when we say Buddha said it you know these were written down 1500 years later yeah but right it comes out of the now this is something I found very interesting too you know the Pure Land School which is very popular in Japan this is Amitabha Buddha is in the Western Paradise in the Western Paradise one of the things about the Western Paradise is there's no female birth and not only that I didn't know this so I just kind of let this sink in that the name of woman will not even be heard there it's just the paradise what amazes me is that it's if there's no female birth then there's no male birth

[50:44]

that there's only if you're a woman that the Buddha's come into the world that there's no sense of gratitude or reverence at all explaining they talk about a pivotal form but they wouldn't have any kind of pivotal form if it wasn't for you know a gift to to use life you know to go to a special place right so I think there's like magical birth there. I don't think they have birth the regular way in the Western Paradise. Now there's another paradise which is less well known. This is the Eastern Paradise of Akshobhya. And I kind of like this one. In the Eastern Paradise there's no sexual desire. I don't know about that, but there's no jealousy and all the women are beautiful and they become pregnant without intercourse and they give birth, this is interesting, safely. The mother and child, the safety of the

[51:47]

birth is assured. So I think this was a big, well I know personally, the fear that you know you may die in childbirth or the child may die. This is and they, I mean I don't know what the mortality rate was in you know 100 BC, but in Third World countries you know infant mortality rate. Anyway so this this particular paradise, the safety of the mother and child is assured and and all these kind of some difficulties. So women are not taken out of there, but some difficulties and fears are relieved in the Eastern Paradise of Akshobhya. No this is, men are there too. This is just, oh because they're not having intercourse. I think they all practice Zazen and stuff, all of them, in the Eastern Paradise. Was there a hand over here? Were you, no.

[52:51]

Question, do you want it to, I mean the first thing that I thought in a sort of generous way or whatever we think about, was it Western Paradise? Western Paradise, there's no female leader. And I thought well, is that the place, when you think of Nirvana, then there's no differentiation of self and other. There's more of a unity. There's not the naming. Maybe there's not this sort of separation, in a sense, since this is coming down through patriarchy. In a certain sense, you're more in a sort of a unit, I mean, unity. I don't, there's sort of a difference between taking things literally. Yeah, yeah. I mean, which is how it was used in the past now. Yeah. Versus saying, there's not separation. Well, I think that's an interesting point because, you know, one may believe this and want to go to the Western Paradise and mean no harm to anybody

[54:04]

and feel like this is good, this is a good place to be. There are men there though. There's not like some neutral, you know, there are the formless realms. Let's see, there's the desire realm and the form realm and the formless realm. There's realms where there are no men or women. There's just like big blobs that go bouncing around like bubbles of different colors and stuff. There are these realms like that. And, but the Western Paradise isn't that way, you know. So, what? Big blobs of color bouncing around. I mean, it sort of reminds me of back in the 70s when we were all dropping acid, you know. It was like these guys were back there making up all this stuff about different realms and bubbles, you know. Yeah, well, these are places you can enter and find out about in certain meditational states, you know, that we don't particularly advocate. But there are these realms that you can read about, you know.

[55:09]

So, this is part of Pure Land Buddhism? No, not the bubbles, not those bouncing bubbles. But I think what Sonya was bringing up is, you know, you can feel like there's no harm done. This is, people want to just make a unity or, but I think what's extremely important is to look at, the way in which these kinds of teachings affect people, you know. Because you begin, what happens is you internalize, women internalize these things, and the men internalize these things. And there's an enormous amount of pain involved in that. So, like in the Pure Land, there was this note that said, in the funerals, if a woman died, let's imagine somebody you know has died there in Pure Land, and then they're given a name, you know. In the Buddhist funeral, you're given a name to go on your journey if you haven't been ordained.

[56:10]

Or even if you have been lay ordained, you're sometimes given a new name to help you. Well, the only names they would give were men's names. They wouldn't give women a woman's name. So here's, let's say, your mother or something. And then she gets named, a man's name, you know, to go, to help her in the Western Paradise. And there's some pain, I think, involved in that. And you can switch it, you know, to think about if you're a man, and you couldn't be given a man's name. You had to be given a woman's name to go on to the Western Paradise if, you know, this was your belief. So, I don't want to, I don't want to accuse, which I've said from the beginning, or even say misogynist, but these teachings have an effect. And the internalization of the stereotype, where you begin to believe you don't have spiritual potential,

[57:18]

you limit yourself by virtue of gender, for women in particular, but men in certain areas, too, limit themselves by these gender beliefs that their gender can only do such and such. And it's all very constructed, you know, and conditioned. What you even believe is so conditioned, rather than this essence, you know, that you have. So, I'm going to continue. Yes. I'm sitting here wishing that I had never heard this stuff, even though I know it does flesh out the history of Buddhism. And I just can't believe that the Buddha taught a lot of this stuff. Well, that's what I'm sitting here feeling, and it's almost like, you know, I don't want to hear this. Right.

[58:19]

I imagine a number of us might be feeling that. And I feel it's, you know, we live in the Bay, you know, there's Hinayana, Mahayana, and Bay Area Buddhism. So we live in the Bay Area bubble, you know, and we have every kind of Buddhism you could imagine. It's all here. You can go to Tibet, and you can go there. And it's completely infused with psychological understanding, feminism, and it's, you know. But I think it's very important to actually see kind of what are the historical threads and trends, because in other countries, like in Asian countries, this is very operative, you know, about women not, well, they can't have full ordination. They can't, you know, they eat last. You know, someone who was visiting, you know, all the monks gobbled up everything, and then these little old ladies who had been ordained for 50 years got the scraps, literally, and that kind of thing.

[59:25]

This is not something that happened 2,000 years ago. Well, and it's even, somebody like Sue Moon goes to, went to Tibet, yeah, and she couldn't go into any of the temples, and none of the women can go, or they don't even acknowledge that women are ordained. So this is part of our heritage, you might say, that it's important for us to be cognizant of, so that when we see it, we can undo it if we see it arising, you know. Yes. I think it's so pervasive, and I came really wanting to say something tonight, and I was waiting for my opening, and I'm going to say it, because I think it fits here. I attended a women's sitting at Berkeley Zen Center yesterday, and when it was all, it was a session, actually.

[60:26]

We observed the more formal forms, and at the end, everyone went around and had a minute to say something, and all the women just kept saying it was a kinder and gentler session, and it was really, it was beginner's mind, because from the tenzo to the session director to the servers to the people that were sitting, a lot of it was first time, and everyone said how it just felt so gentle and so safe and nice to be there, and wasn't it interesting that that happened with women? And I was talking to someone afterwards who has been sitting for quite some time, and I asked her, like, what was the difference for you? And she said, well, Dad wasn't there. And I said, well, what does that mean? She goes, well, Dad wasn't there. You know, when he's there, these rules don't play out. And it left me feeling like I had had this, like, watered down Zen experience, or not quite the real thing, because it was all women. And it left me feeling like, well, what is the real Zen experience?

[61:26]

And if I took away what's conditioned by men and what's conditioned by women, what would just Zen be? And so that, I don't know, I wanted to put that out, and I didn't ask you to address that, because I think there is something about not just a man, but an authority figure. And when men have been the ones who've always had the authority, and now women are starting to have it as well, if you just pull it all away, what's there? What is Zen? Was your experience of the sitting before this conversation, after, was it, how was that for you, just before you? Well, it was positive. It didn't feel, I mean, I actually felt like I would have liked it to be more rigorous. More rigorous, uh-huh. Yeah, and that there is something to be gained from the stricter forms. But what I felt bad about was that there was this way that we all sort of appreciated it,

[62:29]

but we also felt like it was watered down, lightweight. And because it was essentially, because it was very feminine. See, I think it's a very important point that you bring up, because we have this, Now, there's this whole debate going on in sort of feminist discussions right now between the essentialists and the post-modern deconstructionalists. So the essentialists are saying there's something essentially feminine, and it's based in biology, and it's nurturing, and it's kinder and gentler, and it's related, and it's all this and that and the other. And that's essential, that's our essential nature. And then you've got the post-modern deconstructionalists who deconstruct that and say it's all, it's very Buddhist, too, both of them. It all has to do with, you know, upbringing and society and all these other factors.

[63:33]

That's what makes it, that's what makes you feel what's feminine and what isn't. It can all be pulled apart. Some other culture, the feminine is the, I don't know, something very different than kinder and gentler. They're the ones who mete out the punishments or something, I don't know. So you've got these two camps, sort of, you might say. And, right, you know, when somebody says it's kinder and gentler, you know, what it, is that, does that mean woman? Does that equal woman? Kinder and gentler might just be kinder and gentler. And it could be like some old Zen guy hitting you with a slipper, too, you know. So I think we do get caught very much by the stereotype and the, and men do, too. What they see as women, what they see in themselves as feminine or unmanly, you know,

[64:38]

what is it, kinder and gentler? Is that what it is? You know. So, Judith. Well, right then I was thinking, well, I'm female, but I've never been feminine. In that. Yeah. Right. Right. So then you have, then you feel like, well, gee, I don't fit. Maybe I'm not. So the pain of that, never feeling that you fit into the stereotype or the, what is supposed to be, supposedly essential, supposed to be essentially, you know, having to do with your essence. Like some people do not really want to have children, women. This is not their path. And then they're made to feel sort of forever kind of unwomanly or something. You know, so for me, I wouldn't want to equate a woman sitting with anything.

[65:40]

I feel like it's a mystery what happens in a woman sitting when you get women together. And it may be different than what happens in a mixed group. I think this class is different than the class that was all women. I think there's something that happens when you have all women together, and something that happens when all men are together. But what do we name it, you know? So I think pulling apart the kind of gender stereotypes is really, really important. Because they limit. The other sort of subtle or not-so-subtle subtext I hear up there is the way that maybe women also have still continued or participated in the system, which is to say that it was less, even if it was kinder and gentler, let's just say, and even let's say it was associated with women, it sounds like it's still putting it down as less than because it wasn't the other.

[66:43]

So that's another way that we participate in holding up the status quo. Without, I mean, no man said that. You know, that's still coming from our inner analyst or something. Well, I want to talk about that, which was what we're doing here. You know, this thing that I've been saying about the Dharma is, the Dharma is neither male nor female. We say that, let me just find this. The Dharma is neither male nor female. That sounds like a kind of neutral thing to say, right? But if you study it, it's really saying, it's in the context of androcentrism. It's really saying that women, you can make it too. That's kind of the, you see what I mean? The Dharma is neither male nor female. It's not saying that, and males, you can make it too. It's saying women, and you too, can have a spiritual life.

[67:44]

Do you feel the subtle thing in there? It's not neutral, really. And just let me finish on this one thought. Just in the same way that humanness and maleness are collapsed as the norm, in the spiritual kind of ideal, what's male is seen as spiritual. So if we were to write on the board, I was thinking of doing this. Okay, what do you see as sort of spiritual qualities or something? You might write all these things. And then what do you see as feminine qualities? Would they match up? What about male qualities? Would they match up? Well, there is some sense that male qualities and the spiritual qualities are conflated. They're matched up. And then the feminine qualities are a little bit lightweight and a little bit, you know. So, and this is the same in sort of Christianity and other religions too, where the spiritual one is really male.

[68:46]

It's not female or male. It's really more male. And then to say that the Dharma is neither male or female means you too can reach that too. I mean... We're talking from a patriarchal base. All religions are patriarchal. And what we try to do, or what we're trying to do, is take that base and somehow reform it. But reform never quite overturns it. We have this base. And I kind of, I want to go back to what Miriam said, and I'd rather not hear this. I'd rather hear that Buddha, in his male-dominated, male-hierarchical role, stood up and said, I have a vision which is totally not androcentric. I would like an enlightened being to be somebody who sees beyond his culture. And I wonder how you, because I'm not a priest, how you deal with that.

[69:55]

How you deal with being somebody who's taking this on in such a serious fashion, this patriarchal religion. Well, I guess I don't see it as unrelentingly so, you know, patriarchal. Which is why I want to study this, you know. So I see these strands of male-centeredness, and then I see these other strands, which I'm dying to get to because you're all going to never sit us in and never come back. You have to tell us the ending first. Right. Max. I mean, why is the Buddha male in this culture? I mean, why? I mean, that just sets the whole thing off, right? When you think about it that way, you know, why? Because, I mean, I think that there's probably other people, I think there's probably women who have had that state. You know, I don't think that there's one Buddha. I just think that that's the one Jesus, but that's what we put in our culture, and why is it like that?

[70:56]

That's us, you know, suddenly, oh, they saw this guy, and then people started to believe him and follow him. And because, you know, maybe that's because he was male, you know. So, I mean, I was just getting that thought, you know, like, why is the Buddha male? Well, there's two things. There's the historical Buddha, who happened to be, just like Jesus, happened to be a male teacher. You know, that's all. Just he was, and taught. Now, there's also the three bodies of the Buddha. The Dharmakaya, Kaya's body. Dharmakaya, the Sambhogakaya, and the Nirmanakaya. The Dharmakaya is neither male nor female. The Dharmakaya is just the absolute Buddha nature truth, you know. And the Sambhogakaya, which is the bliss body, and the Nirmanakaya, which is the manifestation body, is male and female. The bliss body, the Bodhisattvas, and that they come in both, male and female. So, we are very, this, she calls, she says, counter-negative blessings. I think that's the name of the little section. Counter what?

[71:58]

Negative blessings, I think. Because Buddhism happens to be a non-theistic religion. Even though we have the Buddha as a great teacher, and these various celestial Bodhisattvas, you know, we don't have a supreme being from whom all gifts come, who created us, that's male, and absolute, and gives revealed teachings. We don't have that. Very luckily, because you have, in Christianity and Judaism, they have to wrestle, and it's intractable, you know, that there is this very important, central, central, the most central, male God. Even though it's said that it's neither male nor female, it's pronoun, and it's very hard to insert she for, you know, our Father who is, however that goes, who art in heaven.

[72:59]

Our Mother who art in heaven, hallowed be her name. What? Creator. The Creator. So, it's, so we're lucky in the sense of, we don't have to kind of undo that. We don't have an absolute male being that we have to somehow come to terms with. We have male teachers, and we also have these wonderful female Buddhas and female Bodhisattvas that we don't, you know, the goddess religion that's so prevalent today, and Wicca, and these things, they have to kind of try and remember what it must have been like, because there really isn't an unbroken lineage of practitioners of this. You know, they go back and try to study and look at art and that kind of thing, but they have to try and remember. It's not a lineage that's been passed down. But we have kind of, right there, we have Huan Yin and Prajnaparamita, and we have Yeshe Tsogyal, who's the bliss, the great bliss mother,

[74:06]

and Tara Buddha, who's called Tara Buddha, and the Lion's Roar of Queen Srimala, which is a sutra, and she's thought of as a female Buddha. She was predicted to be a Buddha, and this is another sutra. So, we actually have... What's this? Someone doesn't like what we're talking about. Yeah. So, the kind of empowerment that I feel, or kind of healing... See, this is, in terms of the pain of inculcating and incorporating the... being marginalized and thought of as the other, and all these things that we incorporate, the healing of having these mythic figures, basically, of Huan Yin and Tara, and that's Tara over there, Green Tara, Prajnaparamita as active energies that you can relate to. And in the Tibetan Buddhism, you do meditations where you visualize,

[75:10]

maybe some of you have done them, yourself as Tara. This is male and female, where you... And then, well, the one that I've been exposed to, that you see the Green Tara and make offerings and do her chant and various things, and then, at a certain point, she gets closer and closer and closer, and then she merges with you, and then you are Green Tara, and you're looking out on the congregation, the assembly that's stretched before you, and you are sitting there as Tara, you know, with translucent light. You know, she's got these rainbow leggings on, and you sit there and you look out, and this is a meditation, and it's extremely healing, you know, for... because there's a wound there of never... when you never see mirrored, you know, when you're growing up, and never see mirrored anywhere a female model or energy that's reflecting back your own spiritual inclinations.

[76:13]

It's very painful, even though you can't even name the pain. We talked about that in our first class, kind of, for some of us, what that felt like. So to have in Buddhism these bodhisattvas and buddhas that are female, I feel is extremely important and empowering and healing. I wanted to read... I can barely see, that's five minutes to nine. Now, in Vajrayana Buddhism, so there's Hinayana, Mahayana, Vajrayana in Bay Area, that's right. Vajrayana Buddhism is, you know, Tibetan Buddhism, and they, more than Mahayana, go into this female... upholding the female energy and spirituality of the female body, and the wisdom and compassion. And this is something I wanted to read to you from some maya obligations.

[77:18]

These are, for a tantric practitioner, you have to uphold these if you're going to continue on the path. These are, like, extremely important. And if you break them, you've broken your vows, basically. There's some maya obligations. And the 14th root downfall is this. If one disparages women who are of the nature of wisdom, that is the 14th root downfall. That is to say, women are the symbol of wisdom, and sunyata, that means emptiness, showing both. It is therefore a root downfall to dispraise women in every possible way, saying that women are without spiritual merit and made of unclean things, not considering their good qualities. If one says a little against a woman, that can be purified. But if the woman disparaged is a Vajra sister, and one considers her as one's enemy,

[78:19]

that is the third and heavier root downfall. If the woman is not actually a Vajra sister, to give up being friendly to her is the fourth root downfall. And I think this is worthy of note, that disparagement of women is seen as an impediment to one's spiritual progress and practice. That's all. And just as simple as that. And then she says that, I know of no religious ruling which more decisively outlaws institutionalized or private prejudice against women in any form whatsoever. So, there are these things to be found in Buddhism as well, right? And more things, too.

[79:21]

Didn't Buddha call the earth as his witness on the night of his death? And the earth is symbolized as female? Yeah, it was she, I think they say the earth, I think she shook in seven ways. So the other things that I kind of wanted to get to, but maybe we won't do it, are just the teaching of prajna, but I think maybe that's enough for tonight, it's nine o'clock. Can I ask a question? Yes. You know, as I was thinking about what Miriam was saying, and what she'd heard, and I don't know if this fits in, or exactly where it's come in history, but I remember hearing that in some ways you have to go beyond the teacher,

[80:24]

each generation, in a certain sense, that in order to, in a way to me it sounds like progress, which you're also not, it's not a matter of progress, but on the other hand it's breaking through each time, or layer, or something, and as I was sitting here I was thinking about, I don't know what chant it's in, or are you weird to feel grateful for this present incarnation, or this birth here in the Bay Area, maybe we could add, or whatever, but whatever that means, to go beyond the teaching that was the teaching, it's not maybe like he or it then was the ultimate, in a certain sense, but it's also what helps me to being a lamp unto myself, that's what we would say. Yeah, I think we can say this is history, and this is how it is,

[81:25]

and now what? Now what do we do? And what do we know? What is our experience? And it means thoroughly understanding who you are, how these things affect you. So let's do our closing chant. Amen. Peace.

[82:01]

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