It's my great pleasure to introduce Kano, who mentioned Catherine Cascade. She is someone who's been our main mentor for many years. The last one, as you can see, is the Satoru Nucho Forum by Hosokawa. She was a resident here. Thank you. Boy, hearing my voice like this is going to take a little bit getting used to. How is the volume for you? Is it okay? Okay, good. Well, it's a pleasure to be here for this Assembly of the Women Sangha today.

[01:10]

It's been a while since I've been here in the Zendo, and there's this kind of combination of the familiar returning to the mothership, and looking around and seeing a lot of faces of people I don't know and that's really invigorating. So it's just lovely to be here. Here we are together and here is Maha Pajapati on the altar. I hope you can see her okay. She is the founder of the Women's Sangha. and we are in a significant way here because of her. She opened the way for us as the Women's Sangha. I'm going to talk about her today, some, talk about something that I've come to think of as the mother line of awakening and the ways that, some of the ways,

[02:27]

that I see that operating, operating in us to a greater or lesser degree. And then I want to leave a really good chunk of time for discussion. I understand and I remember from previous women's sessions that Having the opportunity to talk, to have a more intimate discussion is one of the things that people particularly appreciate about Women's Sessions. At my little Zendo, which is really quite small, what we do at the end of our monthly one-day Sashin is something we call Kitchen Table Dharma. And we're small enough that we actually do sit around the kitchen table extended to its greatest length and share our thoughts.

[03:40]

And it's quite intimate and that's what I'm hoping that we'll be able to do today. It's really my most enjoyed form of a Dharma talk or of Dharma talking. So here's Mahapajapati. She is not an idealized figure like Prajnaparamita. She's a flesh and blood woman. If you can see her, she's got kind of a soft, round tummy. She has a bosom that shows the effect of gravity over some years. She's not in her youth body. When I look at her, I think, oh, she looks a little like me. Some of you still are in your beautiful youth body, but just wait.

[04:50]

She's got big feet. She's got big hands. So she was Shakyamuni's aunt and his foster mother. She breastfed him when his own mother died when he was just a few days old. And she raised him up with her own child. And later she set out on her own spiritual path and with very great difficulty founded and led the women's sangha alongside the men's sangha in the time of the Buddha. Hers is the first name on the list of the women ancestors that will chant when we do service right before lunch. Great teacher, Mahapajapati Gautami.

[05:54]

So, we usually say women ancestors in our tradition. But a while back, I came upon the term mother line. I came upon that in the writings of Carol Lee Flinders. She's a scholar, she was at UC Berkeley for a while, and a meditator, and she studies the intersection of feminism and spirituality. And she talks about the mother line, the mother line of awakening. It's really struck with me, stuck with me. She talks about the mother line as a wellspring of strength and authority accessed through women recognizing and supporting each other over a long arc of time.

[07:02]

And I really like the term motherline because it speaks to something functional and embodied. It speaks to something, an intimate connection. It speaks to hands-on relationships, to a particular kind of love. the love that's expressed in the labor of caregiving, loving care. And I think those big hands express something of that, the hands-on embodied quality. But motherline is kind of a loaded word because we may or may not receive it from our mothers, our own mothers.

[08:13]

In my case, I received that kind of hands-on loving care from my father and two of my aunts who stepped in when my own mother was disabled by mental illness. and wasn't able to take care of us. So, a big thank you, thank goodness for aunts. In many cultures, aunties are really seen as the part of what I'm thinking of as the mother line. And it's not necessarily generational. We relate with each other in this way, this supportive, hands-on offering of loving care.

[09:22]

We might call it a sister line as well as a mother line. And that points to the horizontality of a lot of the particularly rich relationships that we have with each other on the path of practice. And it's not even necessarily gendered. Genderizing is such a slippery slope. Suzuki Roshi famously said that trying to talk about the absolute is making a mistake on purpose, and trying to talk about anything in terms of gender is like making a mistake on purpose, at least to some extent. One of my sons is a nurse.

[10:30]

and a nurturing single father. And he keeps me straightened out about that. So the mother line is about a way of functioning in relationship. Recognizing each other and responding in embodied ways with loving care and support raising up and encouraging. So Mahapajapati's story begins that way with the infant Shakyamuni. In a very concrete way, he needed the loving care that she provided to survive and to fulfill his life. and to wake up, to wake up to his true nature.

[11:35]

Babies who don't receive that from someone don't thrive. And sometimes they don't even survive. They may be adequately fed, kept adequately clean, but if they aren't held, If somebody doesn't look into their eyes and talk to them in that special kind of a voice that even animals use with their young. Where I live, we have this enormous flock of wild turkeys. And I hear them talking to the little turkeys. And I know who's talking and I know what kind of thing they're saying. You've probably heard that too. Not necessarily turkeys. The babies that don't get that, they don't thrive.

[12:46]

And sometimes they don't even survive. So in this very concrete way, Shakyamuni and all of us here are here because somebody loved us in that way, at least enough, at least enough for us to be here, resolving to awaken together. But it's not just about what happens in infancy and in those formative early years of our lives. There were a couple of women researchers named Laura Cusino-Klein and Shelly Taylor, and they're at the UCLA Social Neuroscience Lab.

[13:47]

And they looked at a response to stress in women that they called Tend and Befriend. And their curiosity was piqued during a time when things were really not going well in their lab. And everybody was stressed. And they noticed that the men tended to kind of hunker down and brood. But what the women tended to do was they tended to come in early, get a cup of coffee, check in with each other, see how each person's work was going, how they were doing. They drew together, they turned towards each other. So for a long time, the research on responses to stress was just done on men. And so it gave us the flight or fight, fight or flight, I don't know which order, stress response.

[14:58]

But what they saw was that women often tended to respond in a different way, in this tend and befriend way. By coming together, talking, touching each other, food was usually involved. Maybe you're familiar with this. So this was somewhat mediated by hormones and it wasn't just in women, but it was predominantly in women. And it makes some sense, given our greater vulnerability. One of the words that comes up around all women's gatherings is safety. So I can't speak to the science in this, but it matches my own experience.

[16:05]

And I think it sheds some light on what we're talking about with the mother line and the sister line as a way of responding, a way of functioning. It's turning toward each other. It's taking refuge with each other when things are difficult and responding in embodied, caring ways. taking refuge in the Sangha in this particular way. So we practice in samsara that which is difficult to bear. The Buddha's first noble truth is that suffering exists. What is difficult to bear is part of the territory of being human.

[17:07]

Sometimes in rendering that first noble truth, the word stress is used instead of suffering because we experience it on such a spectrum from, you know, what's sort of annoying to what's really distressing to what's almost unbearable. But whatever the valence, it's one of the marks of our human life. It's not all there is, but it comes with the territory. And it's in the arising of stress or suffering, of some kind of difficulty, something that's difficult to bear, that we tend to tend and befriend each other. turning toward each other, reaching out to touch the source of suffering, which is the illusion that we're separate, the illusion of our separateness, that I am separate and alone.

[18:32]

I am not safe. Whoops. So this embodied care and connection at those moments is one of the ways that we embody the great way, resolving to awaken, to awaken together. The mother line of awakening flowing through us, manifesting in us, right here, right now. And it can look so ordinary. It can look so stereotyped. This reaching out and talking things over. A hug.

[19:35]

Taking food to a difficult meeting. Such ordinary, everyday responses. that we might miss the treasure that's operating right at the heart of the matter. So the Upada Sutta in the Pali Canon tells the story of a conversation between the Buddha and Ananda that points directly to the treasure. This, the Upadasuta is called half of the holy life. Venerable Ananda said to the blessed one, this is half of the holy life, Lord. Admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie.

[20:43]

The blessed one responded, Don't say that, Ananda. Don't say that. Admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie is actually the whole of the holy life. So the holy life here means being a part of the Sangha, participating in the life of the Sangha. Sangha is one of the three treasures. It's usually the third one that we say. Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, the three treasures. The community. Our life in relationship in the community on the path of practice. And it's referring to a particular kind of friendship.

[21:53]

In that translation, it's called admirable friendship. Sometimes it's called noble friendship. Sometimes it's called spiritual friendship. The Pali term is kalyanamita. And he's saying that enacting and embodying that kind of friendship is at the heart of what it means to take part in the life of the Sangha. So kalyana, it's a Pali word. It means lovely or blessed. And mita means friend. It's related to the word Metta, which you probably know from the Metta Sutta, the Sutta on loving kindness.

[22:59]

Metta meaning loving kindness. Shines a light on what it means to be a friend. And lovely here, Kalyana, It doesn't just describe the friend, but is meant to include the lovely. So during service, the first thing that we're going to chant is the hymn to Prajnaparamita. And it begins, homage to the perfection of wisdom. the lovely, the holy. So it's pointing to the blessing itself. We have a beautiful statue of Prajnaparamita right here on the altar.

[24:10]

It's at the base, under the statue of the Buddha. I don't know if you can see it very well from the back. You can probably tell I really love images. This is a beautiful one. She's there at the base, like the ground out of which the Buddha arose, like the ground out of which awakening mind our own awakening mind arises. This statue of Prajnaparamita is the work of Rebecca Mayeno, another name in our mother line here at Berkeley Zen Center, the mother line of awakening.

[25:11]

She made quite a number of these. And here, this one is, she's showing us something about who we are. How it works. What we're doing. What's doing us. So, Kalyanamita is a friendship in which this element, the lovely, the holy, is especially salient. It's a friendship in which we see this in each other. One of the things we do often is we bow to each other.

[26:18]

This bow is a recognition. I see you. It can become kind of rote, especially if you live in a monastic setting like I did for some years, and whenever you past someone, whenever you encounter someone, you bow. You stop and bow. Like most forms, it can become kind of automatic and rote. But if we fully inhabit it, if we fully embody it, if we're fully present for it, it can be a ritual that really affects us, that changes something about how we meet each other.

[27:22]

So Kalyanamita can refer to the vertical teacher-student relationship or to horizontal relationships. between Sangha members, so it describes both the mother line and the sister line. And in fact, it can be at the heart of any important relationship. So back to Mahapajapati. Look again at her hands. You may notice that one of them has a thumb broken off. She's taken a fall. She's a little bit broken like the rest of us, but she's still there. And she's really giving us a double whammy of two very powerful mudras.

[28:37]

This one, is the fearlessness mudra, the abhaya mudra. And this one with her left hand is the welcoming mudra, the varada mudra. She is positioned like a sort of like a greeter at our little zendo. She's at the top of the stairs that take you to the Zendo. It's on the second floor, like that attic Zendo where BCC started so many years ago. It's the space that we have, but it's not so good because we have someone in a wheelchair who can't get up there. So we adapt. We make it work. She doesn't have to go up the stairs. But she's there at the top of the stairs and I pass her many times a day and I feel like what she's saying to me is, buck up and sit down.

[29:47]

So fearlessness. This mudra probably predates Buddhism. It It indicates a kind of a greeting to when meeting a stranger that's expressing good intentions and a desire to have a friendly interaction. It's like, I'm not armed. We don't need to be afraid of each other. It kind of, it's very upright. You can expect me to stand up straight. And it sort of goes with this welcoming mudra.

[30:53]

Hello, I'm inviting you to join me. I'm inviting relationship here. It's sort of like a hostess. But this also functions, when you do it, kind of like the power pose I heard about in a TED Talk. This isn't the power pose that that person is talking about, but she, maybe a lot of people have heard that TED Talk, so you might know it. And it points to how what we do with our bodies affects our whole way of being in ourself. So try it. See what that feels like. It's very strong. It's very upright. And the welcome mudra, when I do it, it feels revelatory.

[32:03]

It's like, this is it. This is it. This is where it's at. Right here. Right here. So I started out talking about Mahapajapati's story at the beginning with the infant Shakyamuni. But this image seems to me to be from the last part of her, the later part of her story. So after the Buddha's enlightenment, the men in the community started leaving home to follow him. And Mahapajapati wanted to do that too. came to him and asked to do that.

[33:07]

So as the story goes, and this is a story, we don't really know what happened all that time ago, but this is the story that we have. It's the origin story of the Women's Sangha. And as that story goes, she went to the Buddha three times and she asked to be admitted to the Sangha, and he said no. And as time went on, more and more women joined her. More and more women wanted to devote themselves to life on the path of practice. And with these refusals, They remained undaunted. They cut off their hair, they put on robes, and they set out on the path and continued to follow the Buddha, continued to follow the path of awakening mind.

[34:23]

So at that point, after the third refusal, Ananda intervened. He said, maybe I can help. I'll ask on your behalf. So he asked too. And the Buddha refused three times. And then he got an idea. Maybe I'll come in from another angle. Maybe I'll try this a different way. So he said to the Buddha, so can women achieve enlightenment the same as men? And the Buddha allowed us how they could. We could. And he said to the Buddha, you know, you owe her.

[35:31]

You owe her. She picked you up. She suckled you at her breast. She raised you up. You owe her the opportunity to be on the path together with everybody else. I said, okay. So I imagine Mahapajapati standing like this with the 500 women. That's how they describe this big group of women that was with her, the 500 women. It just means really a lot. They just kept coming. Standing like this with them. They've been refused entry. Again and again.

[36:36]

Now they've shaved their heads. Now they've put on robes. Now they've recognized and validated themselves and each other. And they've gone forth. They are on the path of practice, resolving to awaken. Already functioning authentically, without hindrance. So she stands like this, giving fearlessness with her body, with her own body, and welcoming them to the path that's right in front of them, right in front of their feet. This is it. This is it. No hindrance, just take the next step.

[37:40]

Having faith in their own deepest experience, faith in the experience of their own true nature, fearlessness arose and they took the next step. They bore witness to each other, giving and receiving confidence in their innate worthiness and strength to go forth and practice fully. So this is where the strength comes from. And I think it's significant that Mahapajapati and the 500 women go forth together as a group, that she's not some solitary heroic figure.

[38:47]

She's one of many. Jan Natia, who's a scholar who studies Mahapajapati, says that She's not singled out as anybody special in the Therigatha, which is the enlightenment poems of those first Buddhist women. She's nobody special. She's one of many. And it's like that, I think, in the modern anthologies that have been coming out of contemporary women's teachings. I'm thinking particularly of Temple Ground Press up in Olympia, Washington, that put out The Hidden Lamp, and several other anthologies of teachings of contemporary women teachers. Lori Sinaki's in one of those. And Karen back there behind the post.

[39:54]

Yeah. there is this incredible wealth of voices in the mother line and the sister line. And it's not a sort of big name with followers kind of a thing going on. So this little bitty statue, I think says something about our connectedness. I don't know if you can see it very well. It's sort of like a lump of clay with a whole lot of heads sticking up. And it's a group of women. And it's a single body. A single unit. And what I like the best about it

[40:57]

is that if you look inside, it's empty. Just like us. So now I want to open things up to other voices, to hear Who's in your mother line? How does that inform, how does that take form in your own practice? What's your experience of being part of the Women's Sangha? Yeah, we are.

[42:46]

We're going to say her prayer for peace. Well, for me, I probably like many. Sherry, was you not speaking up? Okay, for me, probably like many when I first came to U.S.C. And it was women who approached me, Rebecca, and there was one in Dali. Those are people that, they just drew me and they noticed me. They said, oh, you know, I noticed you've been around. You should start going to Sashim. There's a sign up sheet. Let me take you there. And when they gave me that first connection, And feeling like, oh, I'm seen. And they really want me.

[43:48]

They really notice me. They want me to be part of it. So that was really a deepening thing for me. Because I hadn't come here to be part of a song. I hadn't come here to really meditate in whatever I was doing, whatever I thought I was doing. Which was mainly getting away in the space of A, those hands. It's still here on the line. I came here about seven years ago, and it was actually very surprised and felt very welcomed by the presence and the leadership here. And I continue to feel that way throughout my practice here. And in terms of the sister line,

[44:52]

I'm pretty bad at aging, so I just have... I was so touched by the women's voices. They were all men. It's another bar.

[46:16]

Well, it's lovely. And it's also hard, because it wasn't until just in the last couple of years with a lot of awareness coming about that I realized that these women in the early mother line are now in modern tolerance, what I would call women of color. I realized in a way in my mind I had either whitewashed them or sort of neutralified them as women without any other intersectionality, whether that's race or ethnicity or class, caste. And it's very up for me right now because a dear Dharma encounter a really severe incident at a restaurant of racism and colorism specifically.

[48:08]

And the cops were called on her because she was holding a check and was basically ignored. And when she asserted herself politely, the The person who was stressed herself, because there were so many customers and whatever, who's of Asian-American, so of Asian descent, and which Asian, I don't know, but this is all in a post. And her friend, who acted as an ally, who identifies as Euro-A. And ultimately, they had to leave the scene because cops were calling on her. And she had to prioritize her safety. And then she posted about it.

[49:09]

And it took me a full day to figure out how to respond. And I responded as a pharmacist and a life and body psychopath while naming the specifics. You know, what you wrote touched my soul. I'm so glad that we're dark sisters. And so I couldn't have done that without our practice here and all the women in this room. So I'm just wondering, how do we include that? Really good question. I think that we respond in the moment. from what Meili in her prayer for peace calls the intuitive knowing what to do.

[50:30]

We practice like this, sitting, and her prayer for peace just maps exactly how this works. Sitting in our own bodies and minds, opening to opening to the lovely, to opening ourselves. And as we continue that practice, we get more and more in touch with that intuitive knowing what to do, how to respond to this person. with this happening here, right now. There's, each of us is unique. Each situation is unique. So there isn't like a, you know, it can be helpful to have, to be informed and to have kind of a toolkit for being an ally, for instance, like the women you mentioned.

[51:43]

But when we touch each other's hearts, I think that that touching arises out of that intuitive knowing what to do. And it may or may not look like something recognizable to anybody else. It needs to be felt by that other person in that situation. And it sounds like you You were able to do that with your friend. But they were very deliberate about it.

[53:07]

bring in as helping someone along the path requires more than just one of us at a time. And I appreciate the calm and measured quality of your teaching today. It's really so heartwarming. And I'm enjoying everybody else's did not carry the kind of respect that we need to have in some way. And I have felt unsafe. And it's been very hard for me to struggle to find my way back, because when I come here, I'm, once again, very active. I don't have any solutions for it, but I think this shared sense

[54:41]

Empty inside. Embodied. Many heads together. Many hearts together. It's a lovely, and I think they're singing perhaps? Sure! Which is I think another way that the mother line works, the sister line works, is singing together. Resonating. I practice with a small sangha.

[55:49]

And that sangha is, most mornings, that sangha is open. Not always, but most of the time. And there is a very strong sense of, goodness is good, and I appreciate that very much. But when I came in here today, and I sat down in the same I just had this feeling. I'm really struggling these days with despair.

[57:19]

I think that losing my mother has brought the cycle of death and life to my awareness in a way that I wouldn't have had if it hadn't happened to me. And somehow, this makes the horror in our neighborhoods, on the border, in Carter State, in New York, in our democracy. The violence of poverty and the death and genocide is happening. I don't have an easy time with empathy. I have a neuro, I'm atypical neurologically. that another person, uh, I struggle to perceive another person as whole as I am inside, what is active of mind and feelings.

[58:38]

I just, I don't get that. Yeah, it's not so much. But knowing that the feelings I have about losing my mom with lots of mourning and lots of time and aging, that this is what everyone is feeling who has lost every member of their family in a bombing. or sees their child die of starvation, that this level of horror and despair and grief and inability to stop, not just one death, no matter how hard we try, we can't stop that one death, but that we can't stop a whole, whole country dying, and that each of the women and probably most of the men

[59:53]

have this kind of emotion and despair and not being able to stop it, I'm overwhelmed with this. And I come sit and I get a respite. And that's nice. It's nice to sit down and not think about things. But my suffering, the suffering I feel is from a very very privileged place is just knowing about other people's suffering. That's what's so horrible. And the despair I feel is related to helplessness. And yes, I can be gracious. I can be, in my very privileged universe, I can be kind and nice and helpful. everything.

[61:02]

And so I just say that I would like to find this sangha and the women here have never sat with all of them. As some kind of, if not source of wisdom, experience of Thank you for sharing all of that from that very deep place. What comes up for me as you talk about that,

[62:03]

is that what we do matters here together. We're not going to stop what's going on in Syria. We're not going to, we're not going to fix it. But what we do matters. We are a part of the total dynamic working that you were describing that includes so much suffering and the embodied love that we give and receive in these ordinary ways, and not so ordinary ways, As a number of people have pointed out, just being here and sitting together is not such an ordinary thing.

[63:15]

This matters a great deal, this recognizing each other. this supporting each other, this reaching out, this turning towards each other in the midst of all that you described that I'm terribly aware of as well. And I feel that my individual efforts are puny, particularly around climate change. At the same time, Turning towards that, what you described as despair, going deeply, being willing to be with it as you have been, is a part of what we need to do on the way to giving rise to

[64:28]

This embodiment of the great way. Resolving to awaken. This manifestation of the true nature that we experience in ourselves and each other. This is what the Buddha did. He couldn't fix what was going on in his own time. There's a story that most of you probably know of his tribe going to, being on the edge of going to war and he was able to get them to pull back. Then they were on the verge of going to war again. I think it was about water. He got them to pull back. And then, finally, he couldn't make it stop.

[65:35]

And he had to simply bear witness and continue his practice. And we are the beneficiaries now of that continued practice. It matters a great deal. If we don't embody it and carry it forward, who will? Thank you.

[67:50]

I'm glad you mentioned joy. I think that, well, I'll speak for myself, but I think it's wider than me, that there's a kind of a feeling that what's real is what's nitty gritty and grim and hard, and that joy is kind of lightweight. And so we get out of balance because there is such an awareness of the anguish and the suffering. And one of the four Brahma Viharas is sympathetic joy. loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equilibrium, which is exactly what you were talking about. And I was studying that for a while.

[68:56]

I got very involved with it, and I was really interested in all the other things. I thought, well, I'll get around to sympathetic joy. And I realized that there was, I found out about a book by the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu about joy. And I kept thinking, oh, I ought to read that book, I ought to read that book, and I didn't read that book, and I ought to read that book. And finally, I got it out of the library, and I thought, I ought to read that book. I had an idea that it was a coffee table book, you know, that it was somehow these great men talking about something light. And then I began to realize as I experienced particularly sharply some of the feelings that you were describing about

[70:02]

our world, that I was getting really out of balance over there, and that there were occasions of joy in my life. I have grandchildren, I have a cat, I have chickens, and people I love, and those were occasions of joy, but that I needed more occasions of joy, and that when I opened to the occasions of joy in other people's lives around me. Somebody who I know somewhat, kind of as a matter of course, sent a picture of her new grandbaby. And I looked at this picture and I just, Not everybody likes babies. I didn't like babies until I had some. Puppies are good for this too, and who knows what else.

[71:06]

But that's actually what woke me up to needing to investigate further sympathetic joy. That's something that we offer each other when we open our hearts and we open our lives to each other. We're offering those occasions of joy as well, of sympathetic joy, joy in the joy of others. to talk last year on one of our ancestors. It's Tachibana Hosoneko. Yeah.

[72:22]

And I think sometimes I feel, I just wonder what aspects of that model need to be questioned. And I think I feel this tension particularly now that I'm one of two young children in this kind of life. It's been challenging to find a balance between feeling like I'm for both of those things in a way that feels good to me. families feel welcome here.

[74:12]

But it's something that's been very present for me and I've definitely appreciated the support of some of the women here. Talking about that and finding ways for me to still feel connected here and still feel like I can be a mom, especially when my children are very young still. Raising really, really good questions. I'm wanting to invite someone else to respond who has... I didn't begin really full-on practice till my kids were not little anymore. I kind of went through having other children and having other children And it was really a struggle.

[75:19]

And I think some understanding came to me, and I actually, I talked to Sojin about it. And Sojin was actually very supportive of the fact that I could participate the way I wanted to. And encouraged me to validated, kind of said, you're a great Zen student if you make a vow and you come here 70 days a week, and you try to do this, whatever it is, because you're consciously creating that connection, then you're just the same as everybody else. And in fact, that's really what we do anyway.

[76:21]

It's recognized that everybody has certain principles. So, anyway, for me, I died, and there were other women, of course, that were here that had raised kids with her that I confided in. But it was really, it wasn't a bad understanding. I think some of us have been trying to do that, you know, like with this current going to look at it and critique it, it's really something to say, well, what can I do to participate in this? And then try to do what you can do, and that can come to your practice. And that's as much part of these aspects as actually being here all the time, is you are kind of considering whether to do this practice or not. It's taking this monastic model and making it less and less monastic, more and more semi-monastic, and then suddenly parents have enough leisure time to actually consider taking 10 minutes.

[78:01]

I mean, that's just extremely cutting edge. There's a whole lineage of Japanese women. Women have taught all the way through China, India, China, Japan. They've always said, we got ours from the men. But it's not that there aren't women. But they are men. They are not mothers. So they kept the celibacy rule for themselves because of this, basically. So we are very cutting edge. That's all I want to say. It's really important.

[79:02]

I was going to say that there's no question that it's a constant dialogue because one way or another I think we all get the feeling now that the patriarchy is too much with us. And it is kind of a relief for me to come and be, for that reason. One of the things we found a couple of years ago was that this happened better, this gathering of women, as a half day for this reason. That is, instead of doing one whole long day a year, we do two half days because people are taking care of children, or they're taking care of their husbands, or they're taking care of their mothers, or a variety of circumstances. And it's, as Lori was pointing out, it's not going to look like anything we've seen before.

[80:51]

It needs to come out of that intuitive knowing what to do and putting our heads together, you know, putting our heads together. I like the statues of the 11-headed, 1,000-armed Bodhisattva of Compassion. We need all those heads. not saying, okay, I don't need you, I can do this without you.

[81:57]

Having someone that I love that much that I would never give up on and continue to come back and say, I want to figure this out with you, was really important to me. whole conversation you've been having about mother or sister line and talking about attachment, talking about connection, I think being able to take that practice and there is no better Zen Do in the world than the relationship you have with children and being able to apply that And so we always talk about practice outside of the gate. But I really found that I wasn't outside the gate when I was, or am, raising my kids.

[83:06]

That is its own zendo. And it is a place to having this importance of Sangha, and that it is just as vibrant a practice as it is here on Earth. I think that I see more hands, but I just wanted to comment. I think you're making such an important point about What constitutes valid practice? There is something that we need in being able to come and sit down and be quiet and not have to respond for a while. There's something invaluable about that.

[84:11]

but it is not more valid practice than what Marie is describing. And the depth of that practice and the richness of that practice holds some understandings that we have access to in the extreme difficulty of doing it. takes us deeply into ourselves. And so to bring out what, like Marie was doing, bring out the deeper understanding, the insight that comes from being in that sort of a cauldron, really, I think is important. I am, I can hardly bear to say it's time to stop. But we have, we have just barreled through Outdoor, Outdoor Kin Hin and Zazen and we have now, well it's almost time for midday service.

[85:24]

And we need to have some Outdoor Kin Hin before we have service. So I'm, I'm just loving this. And I'm sorry to cut it off. I'm sure that there's a lot more wonderful things to be heard. Thank you all.

[85:47]

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