Good morning. My name is Karen Sondheim. I actually don't know everyone here, which is exciting and interesting. So I just want to say I'm going to talk for a while and it's going to be recorded. And then after that, we're going to have a discussion which will not be recorded. So when we discuss, I don't want people to, you know, Assume that what's said is confidential. So anyway. I've been a student here for 40 years at the Berkley Zen Center and. The women's, because I have a long history, the women's sasheen has special meaning. We have this sasheen just for women once a year, but it took a lot of work to get this to happen initially.

[01:02]

I don't know how many years ago it was, maybe 25, 30 years ago, that we actually had to battle to have women's sasheens. Some people here I know remember that. But it wasn't, women had to, there were heated discussions, let's put it that way. And it was at the time when, Feminism in the older sense was popular, but some people thought that it was just a bunch of angry women and were either turned off or dismissive of that. So now we've been having this annual Women's Sashin for a number of years and they've taken all kinds of forms and sometimes it almost seemed like people took them for granted, that now, you know, we have this, we don't need to fight and argue anymore.

[02:15]

However, clearly, you know, the climate has changed recently and, I did want to talk a little bit about feminism and anger and Buddhism and our practice. I just want to give a very quick definition of feminism as said by Rita Gross, Rita Gross, in case you don't know, was a theologian and a teacher and a Buddhist and a feminist, and she wrote books like Buddhism After Patriarchy. That was one of her best known books. And a number of people in the academic Buddhist community were afraid of her or didn't like her back in the old days.

[03:27]

You know, she could be rather acerbic and she really said what she thought. She was very outspoken. So her definition is, feminism alleviates suffering caused by gender equality. Now that's very simple. What is there to argue about that? Feminism alleviates suffering caused by gender inequality. Suffering caused by gender inequality. So, for some reason, these angry feminists back in the day, you know, did not meet that image that we often have of the peaceful Buddha. But what happened with Rita Gross, she was raised, she came from a Jewish family, and I don't know, I don't think she was a religious Jew, but she studied religion and was very outspoken about feminism then.

[04:43]

And then she, quote, converted to Buddhism. She took refuge in the Tibetan tradition with Chogyen Trungpa Rinpoche. and she got into a lot of trouble from both the academic feminist community and the Buddhist community. So anyway, so one thing I wanna say in here is about the suffering. Buddhism and our practice is really about suffering and the end of suffering. That's really what the teaching is about. The basic teaching which most of you are familiar with, probably the earliest teaching of the Buddha, when he, his first teaching was about the four noble truths.

[05:46]

And the first truth is, that in life there is suffering. It's inevitable. It's built in. It's an intrinsic part of our existence. And suffering takes many forms, but basically in the Buddhist point of view, it's caused by craving or desire or the wish for things to be different than they are. And it can come from the most mundane thing, like not liking what you eat right now, craving something different, to really large-scale, painful things that come up in our lives that we really don't like. or are afraid of or want to get rid of. So in the Buddha's point of view, suffering is part of life and we're caught in a cycle of attachment and aversion.

[07:02]

We like some things, we don't like other things. And the way we work with this is we start with the human body, with ourselves in this moment. So in Zazen, we begin with the body, we observe the body, we observe the breath, and we often notice pretty quickly discomfort arises. We don't have to sit very long to get uncomfortable. We may be uncomfortable with our knees and ankles or the body starts to hurt. Very often the mind starts to hurt. That's what really becomes apparent. We may be overcome with sadness or anger or exhaustion, just what we encounter it quickly.

[08:06]

And we work with a direct observation of the body and working with that, what immediately arises, which is attachment and aversion. We often discover we don't like what we're experiencing. And as it is said, particularly the way it's phrased in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, is we have what's called a precious human birth because we are very fortunate to be born into a human body that we actually can awaken. Of course, being born into a female body was considered a little less auspicious, but, you know, that's back then.

[09:13]

So I want to talk a little bit about emotions today. particularly because I think of the past and the anger that came up when we were not, that we had to fight so hard just to have a women's sashin in this zendo. Now that is a bit past now, however, I think I probably went through a period of complacency since then but after November I found myself angry again in a way that felt overwhelming and I don't want to have a political discussion exactly, but what concerns me isn't so much what happened on November 8th, but what's happened afterward.

[10:29]

There've been a lot of violent incidents against people who are generally marginalized, women, African-Americans, Jews, and so I've always wondered, you know, what do you do with that feeling of being so angry? And I want to go back to Rita Gross because she had this reputation for being this angry, sarcastic person. And then she started to practice. And she started practicing for a number of years.

[11:34]

And one thing she said, I'm gonna read a little bit from this book where she has an article, but, She said that through practice, she began to feel that anger was less satisfying. She said there used to be some release from venting when injustices were overwhelming. But with less satisfaction derived from venting, anger is replaced by clarity. So I just want to read a little bit about what she said, what happened to her through practice and her anger, her kind of what she describes as righteous, political, feminist anger.

[12:38]

And she talks about the fact there were the two factions, there was the academic faction who didn't get her, and then there was the Buddhist faction that didn't get her. What happened was not what either faction predicted, which is where the magic connecting feminism and the path of practice occurs. After being involved in serious meditation practice for several years, I began to discover that I simply didn't find anger so satisfying any longer. Previously, I had always experienced emotional relief through venting verbally, often with extreme sarcasm and cutting intellect, when I was overwhelmed by misogyny and patriarchy. but I no longer found it so appealing to get mad when gender issues arose because the relief was not reliable. And I began to see that in any case my anger was not doing anything to alleviate the general misery brought about by these circumstances.

[13:46]

I began to realize personally the Buddhist teaching that aggressive speech and action always produce negative counter-reactions. I began to see that people tuned out when I ventilated my angry feelings, and my fits of aggressive rhetoric only caused further mutual entrenchment rather than any significant change in those whom I confronted. I wanted to do something more helpful. These changes were very scary at first because I feared that I was ceasing to care about concerns that had been central to my life for years. Maybe my Buddhist friends were correct and practitioners are not involved in causes, but something was also happening, something else. With practice, the anger that had been so much a part of my feminism had started to transmute. I was no longer experienced so much of the time that painful state in which clarity and anger are totally mixed up.

[14:54]

The clarity remained, but the anger started to settle. My body no longer tensed with hot explosive energy. Instead, I began to hold a relaxed body state that had nothing to do with giving in and everything to do with furthering communication. Now I test myself on issues. I find that if I explode into emotionalism, felt in the energy as cloudy rage, I know that I must work further with the issue by myself before I am fit for public communication about that issue. And I wanted to talk a little bit about that venting. just in a really personal way because I know for me, I've gone through periods where I had a hard time really acknowledging that I'm more focused on my anger and wanting to either justify it or get rid of it.

[16:08]

And I can understand her feeling that if you just bent enough, maybe it'll go away. but you haven't necessarily solved anything. So I want to bring up a really mundane example. There's just this little piece of my life where I have these neighbors and They, when Nancy and I moved into our house, they had two little children. And so I moved from Berkeley, you know, a very transient neighborhood near the campus, to this nice kind of peaceful neighborhood with a bunch of families in Oakland that were very stable. And so the people next door, it was a couple with two little kids, had at least three cars, if not four.

[17:18]

And they also had made their property into a bunch of like in-law, they had an in-law apartment, and they had converted their garage in the back into another apartment. And some of the time they had a couple in each, So there would end up being eight or nine cars associated with that property. And I found myself for the first time mad that I couldn't park in front of my house. Now, when I lived in Berkeley, I could never park within a block of my house. So I don't know why all of a sudden I got into this thing where I wanted to park in front of my house. But it wasn't, I didn't feel that way when I moved in, but what bothered me was all the tenants associated with the neighbors did not want to park in front of their own house because they wanted to be polite to the landlords.

[18:20]

So they all parked, out of politeness, they parked in front of our house. And at one point, these neighbors even had a boat Um, that they parked and they were also very loud about proclaiming proclaiming themselves political progressives. They charged really high rents for their apartments, and they were also big on, you know, why aren't we more diverse, you know? Why is this neighborhood so white? And I'm thinking, well, if you're gonna charge outrageous rents, you know, there's gonna be a diversity problem probably associated with that. But anyway, so, I would come home and vent all the time about their cars, which Nancy couldn't attest to. And it got really tiring. First of all, I felt bad about myself for being so trite and selfish.

[19:28]

My feelings went against my own idea of what I was supposed to feel. But then on the other hand, I thought, these are the greediest people. I mean, look at them, they have two little kids who don't drive, they have four cars, they have a boat, they have all these tenants with their two cars and all their friends, you know? I mean, how greedy can they be? So, I actually one day was meditating and I realized my own greediness, not particularly around, well, it was partly sparked by this, but I really got into in touch with the, I want, I want to be able to park in front of my house. And I fortunately, I was able to see my own greediness without being, you know, letting go of the judgment about it.

[20:39]

which helped me to not put it all on them, to keep insisting they were the bad ones and I was the good one, that all the greed was out there and not in here. I mean, I kind of prided myself on being easy to get along with and, you know, deferential at times, but actually, you know, I didn't like seeing their greed and especially as it was arising in me. And then I decided, but still they have to realize, you know, are they going to have 10 cars and expect me to be happy about that? Or especially you know, sitting there while their tenants offer them the ideal parking spots. So I went over, I knocked on the door, and I, you know, we are cordial, we're not friends, but we're pleasant to each other.

[21:49]

And I said, I know that I don't own the street, and that I don't own any parking space. But and I was somewhat humorous about it. No, but I really I would really like to at least often be able to park near my house. And I reminded them about the number of cars that are associated with their property. We had a few good laughs. They said that they would talk to the tenants, which I don't think they did, but Nancy and I talked to the tenants. You know, so things have improved. I mean, it's kind of gotten to a point where there's definitely some sharing going on. But I bring that up because it's just, you know, it's one of those little everyday things

[22:59]

but it really showed me that I had to own my own greed. It actually felt good, finally, to be able to even say to myself, you know, this is greed and I am feeling it, rather than to just see it out there all the time and feel overwhelmed by what to do about it. Buddhism is not a religion of just smiling. I don't want to say not peaceful. We see these peaceful Buddhas and I think what's really I don't think that they're completely not aggressive.

[24:05]

I think that they are spacious. They are able to hold everything, and that's what looks calm about them. One quote from Melvin MacLeod, who I think also comes from a Tibetan Buddhist training, The Buddhas are not just the love and light people we like to think they are. Of course, their enlightened mind is grounded in total peace. But in that open space, compassion spontaneously arises. It has many manifestations, and one of them is the pure energy of anger. Anger is the power to say no. This is our natural reaction whenever we see someone suffer. We want to stop it. The Buddhas say no to the three poisons that drive injustice.

[25:08]

The three poisons are anger, craving, and ignorance. They are angry about our suffering and they will happily destroy its causes. They aren't angry at us. They are angry for us. I'm sure you've seen some of those images, statues of Buddhas that have swords or the ones that have that face that looks furious. Those are considered protectors of the Dharma. They slay delusion. And I think I'll just end my talk here. I want to read one other thing from Rita Gross. Not only does meditation unlock the power of feminism, it also sustains feminism in the long haul.

[26:14]

I don't see any way that more than 30 years after I began to advocate feminism, I could still be talking about it if I had not begun to practice. If you really want to work with the world on something you care about, practice provides the staying power to avoid burnout, precisely because meditation tames anger and makes it workable. Practice seems to be the foundation for caring about the world without becoming exhausted. It is the foundation of a movement that people are beginning to call engaged Buddhism. Obviously, this was written a long time ago. And Buddhist feminism will be part of that movement. So, by the way, this is from a book that came out a long time ago called Being Bodies, and it was edited by Lenore Friedman and Susan Moon, who's a member of this sangha.

[27:18]

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