And welcome. Tonight I want to talk about, well, the history of women in Buddhism. And this is a kind of preview of an event we're having in April. I wanna talk about, well, I'm gonna read some excerpts and talk about some excerpts from a book on a recent book called The Hidden Lamp, Stories from 25 Centuries of Awakened Women. This is a book edited by Florence Kaplow and Susan Moon, who both happen to be friends of mine. But it's a really excellent book. Florence Kaplow is going to be here to talk about it on Sunday, April 13, both in the morning at our regular morning program and also in the afternoon for discussion.

[01:05]

And actually, women's studies is an important field of Buddhist studies, both for academics and for practitioners of Buddhism now. there in the history of Buddhism and in the lineage of ancestors, the official lineage of the Buddhist ancestors, in our Zen lineage that we chant, and in other Buddhist history, there's not many names of women that are recorded. However, actually there were many, many women who were very actively part of the history of Buddhism and Zen and keeping it alive throughout all this time. So Asian cultures, India and China and Korea and Japan,

[02:14]

We're very patriarchal through all this time, the last 2,500 years, of course. So we're European cultures, and actually things are getting better in some ways, but also in our culture. And actually, now in our time, there's kind of a, we could say, a war on women, and politically, in many places in our country, attack women's health services, and still women are not given equal pay for doing the same jobs. Anyway, in Western Buddhism, there have been efforts to correct this, and there's more to be done. But part of that is to look at the history and how there were actually women who were very much part of the history. And this book is one actually really excellent example of that new history.

[03:21]

And this book is, I think, really wonderful in that there's, I think, 100 stories from India, China, and Japan, I think Korea as well. stories from that history about women. Some of them, we don't know their names. But there's also, what I really love about this book is that there are also commentaries about those stories by modern women teachers and practitioners from many different traditions. And those commentaries are really excellent and kind of reveal that this is a golden age of women Buddhist teachers. And so, Florence is going to be here, Florence Kappeler is going to be here speaking next month, but I wanted to talk about it, about some excerpts from this book as well. So I was just, you know, looking through it and trying to find a few excerpts to read and talk about.

[04:29]

And there are excerpts from many different traditions and lineages, but I ended up selecting a few stories all from excerpts, all with commentaries by women in the lineage that we're part of, Suzuki Roshi's lineage from San Francisco Zen Center. And so I will start by just reading one about Bodhidharma. And Bodhidharma is considered, historically and in legend, the founder of Chan or Zen in China. We have an image of him standing on the altar. on the side of the altar. And the commentary is by a good friend of mine, Vicky Austin, who I saw and went for a long walk with when I was in San Francisco recently.

[05:33]

I'll start with the story, which is longer than most of them. Master Bodhidharma had four senior students, three monks and the nun, Tsongchi. When the time came for him to return to India, he gathered them together. He said to them, the time has come, please express your understanding. Dafu said, the path transcends language and words and yet is not separated from language and words. Bodhidharma said, you have attained my skin. Then the nun, Dzongkha said, it is like the joy of seeing Akshobhya Buddha, Akshobhya Buddha's paradise just once and not again. So this is one of the Buddhas. Now, I forget if it's the Buddha at the north or the east, but there are various Buddhas in the tradition of Mahayana Buddhism. So this is the nun who was one of his four main students. And Bodhidharma said, you have attained my flesh to her. Dalu said, another of his students, the four elements are originally empty.

[06:37]

The five aggregates are non-existence. I see nothing to be attained. And we do say in the Heart Sutra, there's nothing to be attained. And Bodhidharma said, you have attained my bones. Finally, Huike made a bow to the teacher and stood aside in silence. And Bodhidharma said, you have attained my marrow. So this is a very famous story. Traditionally, it's said that Wicca is considered the second ancestor, the first Chinese ancestor, after Bodhidharma. And so it's considered that he had the best understanding that marrow is the deepest of the skin, flesh, bones, and marrow. But that's not really the understanding in our tradition. So, Shosan Victoria Austin's reflection. The great Zen teacher Bodhidharma was the founder of Zen in China. Some sources say that he was Persian. Some sources say Indian. In any event, his teaching was simple and direct, direct enough to survive to the present day.

[07:40]

So there are many stories about Bodhidharma, and some of the scholars have questioned, well, a lot of the stories are obviously legendary and not historical. But we pretty much know now that he did, that there was a historical figure. And these four people are said to have been his disciples. So in the Zen history, we usually think of Bodhidharma's disciple, Huike, as the one who had it right and became Bodhidharma's successor. And the others had a lesser understanding. But actually, Eihei Dogen, I think he writes, the founder of our Zen school in Japan, what's called the Soto Zen School, and Dogen I talk about a lot, He takes great pains in his commentaries on this story to say that all four of the disciples were right. He says this in many places. Any one of them could have been Bodhidharma's successor. In fact, they all four were, according to Dogen. The nun Zongshi's answer is the one that was most maligned by some later commentators.

[08:45]

Of course, she was a woman, so there were later commentators who criticized her. They suggested that she was merely repeating something she had heard. But Bodhidharma said, you have my flesh. This is an acknowledgment of Sangsha's understanding. So what is this paradise that comes just once and not again? Why would Bodhidharma refer to it as flesh? What's important about flesh to Bodhidharma? And so Vicky continues, at that time, women were thought of as creatures of the flesh, and a woman's flesh was thought of as tainted. So this was the prejudice in early Buddhism and in those cultures in India and China. Women had to be reborn in the body of a man in order to awaken, they thought. This was the common understanding in the culture, but Bodhidharma did not say you have a woman's flesh and have to be reborn. He said, you have my flesh. So what did flesh or the body mean to Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen?

[09:46]

Why would he say, you have my flesh, or my body, to his woman disciple, not to one of the men? Elsewhere, Bodhidharma said, the Buddha is your real body, your original mind. This mind has no form, no characteristics, no cause, no effect, no tendons and no bones. It's like space. You can't hold it, except for one who's fully realized. No one, no mortal, no deluded being can fathom it. So in many places in the teaching, this is a physical practice. There's a lot of intellectual stuff about it, but really this is a physical practice. We sit upright and we understand really with our bodies. So the practice is about incorporating Buddha's wisdom in our body. and about becoming Buddha's body, about seeing how this body on your cushion right now is Buddha's body, whether you're a man or a woman.

[10:56]

That's the teaching, actually. So when Bodhidharma says to Dzongkha, the nun, you have my flesh, he means that this thigh, this body, go ahead, slap your thigh, can't be fathomed. But nonetheless, when you slap your thigh, it feels like there's something solid there, doesn't it? How can it not really be there? This is what is called the great mystery or the great matter. And when we sit, Sazen, and we find reality, there is something solid. And we can feel that. And at the same time, we can feel that nothing is ultimately solid. That's what Sazen does. We see that, yes, there is some person sitting on your cushion now. And yet, this self is ephemeral. We can't get a hold of it. It's connected to everything. So our practice is about seeing this connection. So Vicky says, because we can directly experience this in our meditation practice, we can help people.

[12:01]

And then she gives a personal story. A dental hygienist I know, I knew, whose name was Kitty Arnrell, and who died yesterday, Vicky says. was a deeply gentle person. She would bring her dog, Shay, to the dental office to keep people company when they had their teeth cleaned. Sometimes I would feel her kind hands doing the work through the instruments. The kindness of her hands would transmit something about compassion. While cleaning teeth, this is one way to help others. So, very physical. It's not that we have something called Buddha nature or awakened nature. That's some abstraction. The entire body, 100%, is awake in the Buddha nature. Manifesting our Buddha nature is the essence of all the rituals that we do, all the jobs that we do, all the activity in the Zen temple. It is all just for the transmission of awakeness.

[13:02]

So Buddha, the word Buddha just means someone who's awake. I think this is what Bodhidharma was saying. He was saying, Dzongkha, you're a woman, In our society, women can't be awakened, they said. But I'm going to acknowledge your very flesh as the same as mine, as one body of awakening that manifests just like mine. It's a mystery how, as a woman, you have a particular story about yourself in this life, and how, as a man and a monk, I have a different story about myself. And yet, although you manifest in the body of a woman and I manifest in the body of a man, each of us manifests the truth 100%. So this is what Vicky imagines Bodhidharma saying. I can hear him saying all that with, you have my flesh. So that's her commentary on the story about Bodhidharma's disciple, Dzongchen. She's the one who has his flesh. There's another part of the story.

[14:04]

So one of the things that Florence and Susan did when they were writing this, there's a little question at the end of each commentary. They say, can we ever see paradise for more than a moment? And if not, is a moment enough? And that's another aspect of this story that I really like. She said, it's like seeing the Buddha's paradise just once and not again. So actually in our practice, you know, I think it's important that, you know, it doesn't have to be just once, but we get glimpses. So some of us sat all day here yesterday in this room. And, you know, you don't have to sit all day, or sometimes you sit for three days or five days, even in just one period, we get a glimpse of something. To call it something is to defame it, but we get some taste, some sense of something that goes beyond our usual way of seeing ourself in the world.

[15:13]

You know, you might call it paradise. I don't know. Whatever word you want to call it. Some sense of something that goes beyond. And just to get some A little glimpse of that is kind of enough. In fact, to try and get a hold of it or try and hang out there, or even if you're a really ace meditator and you can really force yourself to be there in that space for a long time, that's actually not so good. The point of this practice is how do you get a glimpse of something that goes beyond? You know, we live here in the city as lay people. We live in the world, where the world needs us. So the point of our practice is not to reach some special esoteric experience or understanding. It's to see Buddha, to get a glimpse of what it's like to taste the wholeness of being together with all beings.

[16:26]

But then come back and live in Chicago, or wherever we are, and take care of ourselves, and take care of the people around us, and take care of this world that really needs our care and attention. So this, I think, Zongzhi's statement about getting a glimpse of Akshobhya Buddha, just for a glimpse. And it's joyful, she says. It's like the joy of seeing this Buddha paradise just once, not again. You don't get to see it more than once. And it's okay if you see it more than once. You don't hang out there. Anyway, so that's one story. And I want to tell a few stories from this book, because they're just so cool. And it shows, and the stories themselves, but also the commentaries about them, show the power of, and the prevalence of, and the importance of women teachers in Buddhism, and especially all these wonderful women teachers that are around now.

[17:30]

So I'm going to read a... Well, the next one I'll do is... I'm just going to read a little bit of the commentary. This is from Japan, the story. This is much later. This is in the 18th century. This is about a great Rinzai master named Hakuin who founded modern Rinzai Zen. And this is about an old woman who had a tea shop nearby. So Master Hakuin used to tell his students about an old woman who had a tea shop nearby and praised her understanding of Zen. The students didn't believe that such a person could have much wisdom. So these monks were all, you know, they thought they were hot stuff and they, you know, well, what could an old woman know? So they would go to the tea shop to find out for themselves. Whenever the woman saw them coming, she could tell at once whether the monks had come for tea or to look into her grasp of Zen.

[18:32]

In the former case, she served them graciously. In the latter, she beckoned them to come behind the screen to the back of the tea shop. The instant they obeyed, she struck them with a fire poker. Nine out of ten of them did not escape her beating. So there's lots of stories about these old women who served tea or in other ways hung out near these monasteries and showed up the monks. There's many stories like this. Usually, we don't have their names because it's history, not herstory. We don't have the names of a lot of the women who were very important in Buddhism. Anyway, the commentary on this is from a woman who's a very well-known poet now, Jane Hirshfield. who also studied at San Francisco Zen Center. We practiced together there in the late 70s and early 80s. Very fine person, lovely person.

[19:34]

Anyway, I'm just going to read a little bit of what she says about this story, partly because she quotes the text that I've been talking about that we're going to be talking about in the two-month practice period coming up, the Mountains and Waters Sutra, she starts commenting on this by saying, there are mountains hidden in mountains, there is hiddenness hidden in hiddenness, Rodehe Dogen. So this is from the end of this mountains and water suture that I've started talking about. We're going to be talking about more. Jane says, hiddenness steepens also this story of the unrecognized teacher outside the gate who keeps her abbot stick, a handy fire poker, tucked behind a rice paper screen. Preconception hides the actual behind a screen. One preconception here is surely gender. These monks are skeptical of the practice of a woman. Status can blind as well. The monks are home leavers, wandering clouds. The old woman lives in the world of commerce and thirst, of road dust and fatigue.

[20:37]

How could her understanding compare to their vows, long effort, and strict meditation? And she goes on to talk about lay practice and the tradition of lay practice. So this is, of course, relevant to us. And actually, in our tradition, even the priests, like myself, were lay people, were not monks who were secluded in a monastery. Jane talks about her own life as a poet a little bit in this too. She says, when I left my years of formal training in Zen, years I still feel as the gyroscope and diamond at my life's center. So she lived at Green Gulch in the Tassajara for some time. When I began to make my way as a poet, I didn't hide my Zen background, but I didn't announce it. I didn't want my poems hung on a Buddhist coat peg or read with any pre-existing expectation. As a young student, I learned of the four traditional paths of practice, priest, monk, layperson, and teahouse lady.

[21:38]

As I moved back toward poetry, the old woman's wholehearted yet invisible practice simply felt right to live and write with an unlabeled and unlabeling awareness. So a lot of the Bodhisattva teachings, teachings about helping in the world, You know, this feeling of just living in the world as an ordinary person, being helpful. I have two more I want to read. We'll see how much time we have. This one is actually about an old friend and reflectionist by one of my teachers. So Darlene Cohen, well, it's called Darlene Cohen, Skillful Means. And she was a teacher in our tradition, in our lineage. And she died, well, I'll just read it. The case itself, about two weeks before Darlene Cohen passed away, she was lying on a small sofa in her living room.

[22:44]

And a few students were there. In true form, Darlene announced matter-of-factly, I don't believe in karma or any of that shit. One of her students asked, if you don't believe in any of that, what do you believe in here on the threshold of life and death? Without a moment's hesitation and with much laughter and delight, Darlene said, I believe in skillful means, which means I am going to lie about anything. So skillful means is the teaching of doing whatever is helpful. And Darlene was a real character. The commentary is by Leslie James, who is one of the teachers at Tassajara still, and was one of my teachers in my early days at Zen Center, and a wonderful person. She's actually the one person in our lineage who has dharma transmission as a lay person. She didn't want to get ordained as a priest because she didn't want to be different from others. Now she's the one person who has a green okesa. Anyway, I'll read some of this.

[23:51]

Because Darlene was this wonderful character, so was Leslie. But anyway, this poem is about my dear friend, Darlene Cohen, who died January 12, 2011. Exactly one year later, my granddaughter was born, and I thought, maybe it's Darlene coming back. But then, since I'm her grandmother and I have to watch her mother bring her up, I thought, I hope she's not too much like Darlene, because she would be such a handful. So Leslie talks about Darlene. She met in the mid-'70s when Leslie first came to San Francisco Zen Center. And she says, Darlene was a really beautiful woman, vibrant and alive and feisty, as she was. She was then in her early 30s. Her son was only three years old and she developed severe rheumatoid arthritis. Her hands and legs were deformed and crippled, although she was still beautiful and lively. And eventually, many years later, she got cancer. Darlene was bedridden.

[24:53]

I knew her just a little bit before this happened and she got rheumatoid arthritis and for many years she was totally bedridden. But she used her arthritis as a kind of, became a practice and she learned how to work with it and she learned, she actually overcame it and learned, she became a teacher for people who are very ill. and learned eventually how to get around, and even with the arthritis and with the pain, managed to become a teacher. So I'm just going to read parts of what Leslie says. She studied how to make the drama available to people because she knew that would help her. She did it in her own way, though, with her own skillful means, using whatever it was. Leslie says, I remember that when she and an old friend taught workshops together, I think this was at Tassajara, they would sometimes bring squirt guns and then they would hide behind the bushes besides the path and squirt people as they walked by.

[26:00]

Her commitment to do whatever it took to teach continued right through her last illness. She had various kinds of chemotherapy for the cancer. They would work for a while. But finally, the doctor said, you've probably a couple months to live. In the last weeks of her life, she was really weak. But she even finished a Dharma transmission ceremony for two of her students, which took tremendous amounts of time and energy. So we have the recent example of Steve Stuckey, who did something similar, passed away December 31. Anyway, Darlene, Leslie goes on, Darlene was totally alive until the last minute, but also recognized what was happening. In this story, what does Darlene mean when she says, I don't believe in karma or any of that shit? Karma is, of course, one of the main teachings of Buddhism. I think she was saying, I don't believe in feeling like my karma is limiting me. I don't want you to feel like, oh, this is my karma. Now this is going to happen because I've done that. Darlene's sicknesses were real in her life.

[27:03]

I'm sure she thought at times, this is terrible, I'm all crooked and crinkled. But she never let that limit her. She continued to wear black, lacy clothes from antique stores, saying with her whole body, don't let these beliefs stifle your life. Then someone challenges her in the story, saying, well, here you are in this real situation. What do you believe in now? What do you rely on? And she said that she values skillful means above everything. She says she's willing to lie if necessary. Darlene did lie, Leslie continues, when she was younger to tease someone to get her way. But when she became a teacher and felt that responsibility, her reasons for lying shifted and became about how to be most helpful. Even in her relationships with her students, if you want to call this lying, she would say, OK, my students can think I'm wonderful, even though I may need to go home and climb into bed and eat chocolate chip cookies under the covers and not come out for a few days. They don't need to know everything about me.

[28:05]

They can still call me their teacher. So, but Darlene was funny. She was just, she was actually really, I mean, she was just such a character and she was always cracking jokes. Anyway, Leslie goes on, it's hard to believe that such a life force is gone and yet that is what happens to us. This very unique life force that we all carry goes away. So I think Darlene's teaching was, use it, use it fully. Whatever you are, don't try to be me. It would be impossible. And it would be impossible to be Darlene. But be whoever you are and use it to benefit others. So, the sentence at the end, the Dharma teacher once told a woman with breast cancer, that's your karma. What that skillful means is something else entirely. So these questions at the end are real questions. How do you know if expressing your imperfect self will help others? So when is it helpful to express your imperfect self?

[29:08]

When is it helpful not to? Darlene never hid who she was, actually, on some level. And yet, she would do what she needed to do to express what was helpful. So the last one I want to read is actually the commentary by Florence Kepler herself. I have no idea which story she might be reading or talk about when she comes here next month. found her commentary, and I really liked it. And it very much relates to the Mountains and Water Sutra. And it's also very much about Florence. Florence is a botanist and studies the earth and interconnectedness. So the story she comments on is about another old woman, one of these great old zen grannies that there are lots of stories about. And all it says about the context is that it's from China in the 9th century, which was the century of all these great Chinese masters.

[30:21]

The stories we have. The story goes, once a monk on pilgrimage met an old woman living alone in a hut. The monk asked, do you have any relatives? She said, yes. So this is a hermit woman living alone. Do you have any relatives? She said, yes. And the monk asked, where are they? And she answered, the mountains, rivers, and the whole earth, the plants and trees are all my relatives. So Native American people talk about all my relations, talking about the world. And Dogen talks about mountains and waters, and mountains were constantly walking as a model for our walking. So here's Florence Capilouto's reflection on this. And I want to see if I can read most of this because it's really good. I haven't studied koans in the formal Zen way, which I think she means the Rinzai way.

[31:28]

But as a midwife to this book, I have lived and breathed these koans about women for a few years. This particular old woman and her relatives have accompanied me as I sat in winter retreat, as I worked in the Mojave Desert springtime as a field biologist, as I sit now on a log on the shores of Willapa Bay on the Washington coast, watching the tide move in, listening to the harsh cries of Caspian terns as they wheel and dive out over the water. Encountering a koan can be like diving into the middle of the ocean. At the surface, there is brightness and little waves, my ideas and prior knowledge. Down a few feet, things get quieter and dimmer, and there's more room for the unexpected. Deeper still, and anything at all could appear, sharks, whales, or even the Buddha himself, rising up from the depths with that 18-foot golden body, glimmering in the dark.

[32:31]

When I first dove into this koan, this story about this old woman and her relatives, I was struck by an old woman living alone in a hut. In the stories of old Chinese Buddhist hermits, that's the only one I know where the hermit is a woman. And actually, I have to say, there are There are more stories about women hermits. There's a wonderful book called The Road to Heaven by Red Pine, Bill Porter, who discovered modern Chinese hermits, Taoist and Buddhist hermits, who were living in the mountains in central China and had survived the purge of the Maoist What do they call that anyway? The Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution, yeah. And didn't even know about it. And there were, you know, women hermits there too. So there have been others.

[33:33]

But anyway. But as Florence goes on, a woman in China under Confucian law was subject from birth to death to the absolute will of male family members, father, husband, brother, son. It was neither safe nor sanctioned for a woman to live alone. It was very radical. So who was this old woman anyway? The monk wasn't sure either, perhaps even a little uneasy. Didn't this woman have relatives nearby? How else would she survive? Like her, I have chosen to live alone, and often without a fixed home at all. These last few years, and I've met people like this monk who need to fit me into something they can understand. Even now, today, a woman alone by choice is suspect. Maybe for us in the West, there is an old resonance with witches in the woods. A woman alone is perhaps a woman with powers, or a woman too unpleasant for company, or a woman crazed. Even in our culture, you know, people think that.

[34:38]

But when the old woman turns the monk's question on its head, we know immediately that she is a Zen adept, a teacher. Oh yes, you needn't worry, she has relatives. Just look around, monk, and show me one thing that is not a relative. She's not alone after all. She isn't unsupported. None of us are, however we may feel. Alone? What a word. Am I alone or unsupported as I sit here on this log in the twilight? Maybe, maybe not. There is no one who will make dinner for me tonight. On the other hand, the food in my belly was grown for me by many human hands, by earth, by sunlight. This log grew for a hundred years or more upright in the rain and is now home to countless creatures other than the one who sits here for a while. I have felt more alone in a crowded room than I feel here now. But there is another kind of aloneness, a more pernicious sense of separation that comes from ideas of here and there, I and not I.

[35:42]

Were the old woman's relatives out there beyond her skin or somewhere closer by? With this question, I entered the ocean's depths, the place where anything can appear. And I realized that I need to ask my question to that old hermit, that ancient sister. The Zen stories are quite clear. If you want to truly meet a teacher, you have to ask the question, a real soul-shivering Dharma question. And we can ask. Any teacher, alive or dead, has vowed to answer. So I close my eyes and say to her, across the years, how distant are these relatives of yours? She says, come closer. I lean forward. Even closer, and we are face to face. In that moment of meeting, I understand that relatives are not just out there. They are through and through mountains and rivers and faces and eyebrows and guts and the very subtlest stirrings of mind.

[36:44]

But you must understand that it is the asking that matters, not the answer. Because every real asking, every real meeting comes from the place where the Buddha glimmers in the depths. In the asking is the answerer. In the answer is the asker. And in the meeting of the two, there are mountains, rivers, and the whole earth. So that's Florence's comment. I love it. So this is sort of my introduction to Florence. It's going to be here in a few weeks. And the final little saying, which is, I don't know if it's from Florence or Susan, in response to Florence. Dogen says, rocks and walls teach the Dharma, too. If trees are our relatives, what about the trash and the gutter, the mice under the floor? What do they teach us?

[37:38]

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