I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Good morning. Good morning. I know it's on, but is it working? No. You've got to pull it right in front of you. Move the whole thing? Yes. There it is. Now it is? There it is. Okay? This is daunting. Well, I'm going to talk about women ancestors. So I'm talking about us. One thing that I think it's really useful to remember about all of our ancestors, male and female, is that they are us.

[01:04]

We are they. It's not like they're some amazing other kind of being in some realm that we could never we'll forgive this gaining word, that we could never, to which we could never aspire. That's not so. We are like they were. We are like they are. We're not separate. Years ago, I went to Japan with Meili and Blanche Hartman and Grace and some other women. We did a four-week practice period at Rinzou Inn at the Suzuki Roshi's home temple. And I remember, I just sort of went because Meili was going and it seemed like interesting and a little adventure and got me out of Tassajara for a couple months in the summertime. And so I, all right.

[02:05]

But I did not have a sense of ancestors as mine, partly because whatever we were chanting at the time was all male. And I remember early on in that practice period, this image arose in my mind's eye, and it wasn't one of those brain events, it wasn't a thinking thing, it was very organic. This image arose of just this array of ancestors before me, and I realized that they were mine, that I am of them, and I can look to them for support, and that I can also remember that they're not different from me. They had a hard time too. They sat a sashin and hated the dawan or the timekeeper because that person must have gone to sleep.

[03:08]

They were sure that the period lasted about three hours sometimes. They felt cold and tired and hungry and in pain and cried. They called on Prajnaparamita for help, or Avalokiteshvara, or Jizo, or whoever. I don't know who you call on. I call on Prajnaparamita mostly. I call her, at those times in Sashin, I call her little mother. And I call on her for help. I also call on Joko Beck for help. She gave me a wonderful practice years ago. She said, if you start crying, just cry. No trying to figure out the reason, no story. You say to yourself, just crying and let everything else go.

[04:10]

And you're just crying Buddha right then. She didn't, I say that. She would agree, I think. who we chanted to Tara this morning. I wanna say two things about it. One is that Tara is a female Buddha, and the story about her is that she said that she would become a Buddha as a female. The story had always been that women could practice, but as they became Buddha, they would turn into men. And she said, no, [...] no. We don't do that. I don't do that. And so she became a Buddha as a woman. So she's a pretty important image for us, I think. And also the notion of chanting at the beginning of sitting is something that I experienced

[05:23]

with Maureen Stewart. Some of you probably have sat with her. I don't know. Have you, Linda? And I sat a sashin with her. My first long day sashin was with her at Green Gulch at the instance of Meili, because Meili, she was a very important teacher for Meili. She used to come and lead women's sashins at Oh, what's the place in Alima, right? And did you sit some of those? Yes. And they were apparently very powerful. And then later, she would also she would lead sessions at Green Gulch at the invitation of Norman Fisher, who was the Tonto, the head of practice there. And so I sat my first long session with her there. And one of her practices was to, I think it's a pretty standard Rinzai practice in some ways, begin the day with chanting.

[06:38]

And I'm not sure which one was the first one. It was either Ho, which means Dharma, or Namu Daibosa. Did you do that at the Vedanta Center too? It's a wonderful way, I think, to start a day. It's very energizing. Koreans, Zen people, start the day by doing 108 frustrations, full bows. At Rinzai, people do chanting. Sometimes it's more like the kind of chanting that we would do during service. But she would do the kind of thing that we did. It would be, if you did ho, you just say ho and hold it as long as you can. and then take a breath and just say it again. And the sound, so the sound kind of swells and fades a little bit as people are taking breaths at different times. And it just rolls in the zendo. Namu daibosa means I align myself with bodhisattvas. So I wanted to do it partly to evoke Tara, to sit with her, ask her to sit with us, but also to evoke Maureen Stewart, who is, you know, through Meili and through others of us who have sat with her, she is part of our lineage, too, in some way.

[08:06]

You know, an aunt. She's a Dharma aunt. So I've been thinking a lot about women ancestors. Most of you know that as we did Dharma Transmission, Grace and I, for 21 days you bow to all the ancestors and you offer incense to each one. And we did that, the usual, the long version of the male lineage. which is almost 100 names. And then we had a female lineage list to which we bowed, and that was about 35 names. It included Maureen and it included Maylee.

[09:07]

Maylee was my first practice leader. She's an important teacher for me. Well, I've always thought about it, I guess. I started to say, well, it was them. And when I started doing this practice, I could see that was in 88, and I had but to look around to see that it was definitely a male event. So I luckily started, there was a, the Wednesday night group was then a Monday night group, and Mailey was leading it. So I joined that. partly to have kind of a woman leader in my practice life. But I also kind of looked around and looked for books or articles or whatever that talked about women in practice to find it. Because I think for me, I needed to see myself reflected in some way. I needed to have some sense of... My question was, is there a place for me and people like me here?

[10:16]

Do we have a place here? Do I have a place here? And when I say people like me, I meant women. So I read, what is it? Meetings with Remarkable Women, Lenore Friedman's book. And I read a book called Not Mixing Up Buddhism, which is an anthology of articles from a journal called Ka Hawaii, which was put out by the Diamond Sangha in Hawaii. Part of that was I guess maybe the beginnings of the work that Susan Murcott did translating the Theragatha, the stories of the first Buddhist women teachers. That was a section in there. There was an article by Fran Tribe, another one of our women ancestors, about practicing with family.

[11:25]

And I read a book called A Passionate Journey about a Rinzai nun in Japan, a woman who I gave up family life and practiced in mid-20th century, I guess, maybe a little earlier than that, something like that. I think it was after World War II, though. I'm not sure. I don't remember. It's been a while. But those books were really important to me. because they showed me that I did have a place. That I didn't have to buy into the misogyny that exists in some of the teachings. You know, the stuff about Buddha refusing to ordain his mother. till Ananda intervened.

[12:29]

And then when Buddha did ordain women, he said, well, that sets the dharma back 500 years. Or adding all these extra rules. The most senior woman, supposedly junior to the most junior male monk, that kind of thing. Modern scholarship has, seems to be establishing that a lot of that is apocryphal, by the way, but probably not all of it. One thing that's useful to remember is that this was an oral tradition, and so things kind of fell off I sort of say fell off the page. I guess you don't fall off the page of an oral tradition, but they fell out of knowledge. And this happened to men and women both, but it happened to women, I think, a lot more.

[13:33]

I think that we know from our modern experience that that kind of thing happens. So what do you think it was like in India where women were property pretty much in China where that wasn't, in Japan it wasn't too different. But just recently my sense is that it's as if we have been harboring, caring for, nurturing, a seed. And there's a lot that goes on with a seed before it sprouts and grows. It has to be nurtured in the earth. And there has to be enough water. There has to be enough nutriment. Sometimes there has to be fire, depending on the seed.

[14:40]

The conditions have to occur and conquer and then the seed sprouts, and then it grows, and then it takes form, and it becomes whatever plant, and it flowers, and it fruits, or whatever it's going to do. And my sense is that there has been a tremendous amount of nurturing going on, and not really under the ground so much. There's been a lot that a lot of people have known about. There's a lot of scholarship that's been going on for the last, oh, I don't know, 10 years, something like that. But it seems to me that all of a sudden, boom, it's become really visible. And we had the women's meeting and talked about a women's lineage. I mean, we've been chanting the acharyas here, and San Francisco Zen Center has a list for they were chanting the acharyas, and then it expanded to include some Chinese and Japanese women.

[15:47]

But still, it's been not so substantial. I mean, I don't want to dismiss it. The first time I ever chanted the acharyas, I burst into tears. And the first time, I think it was at Tassajara, when I chanted the expanded list, I burst into tears. And I cried as I chanted the, you know, as we did the bows to the women ancestors, Grace and I. So I don't want to discount it, but it's, I started to say it's kind of thrown together a little bit, and then I realized, yes, but any lineage is thrown together. Excuse me, could you turn the clock around, because I don't have a watch on, or somebody, is there? Here, I'm going to get a clock, because I can't see that far.

[16:53]

Here. Thanks. Thank you. Yes, ma'am. Whoa. We are going to have tea, so we'll see. I probably won't have time for questions. I don't know. But that's what the tea is for, to talk about this stuff. So lineage. You know, you probably know this, the male lineage that we chant has gaps in it. We pride ourselves, right? It goes all the way back to Buddha. Warm hand to warm hand, right? Well, not. There are gaps. And there are people, you know, we don't really even know if Bodhidharma existed. And if he did exist, just how?

[17:54]

You know, people who practice karate think that Bodhidharma belongs to them. We don't know. Was he a martial arts expert? I don't know. I mean, I doubt it, but then that's, this is my story. Nagarjuna is not so clear. Many of them are not, we don't really know whether or not they existed at all, and if they did exist, just how, and how much to attribute to them. There are a lot of disputes about the various things that are attributed to Bodhidharma, and there are a couple of things that probably are his. Does it matter? Not so much, not to me. I think it matters, I think it's useful to know that. I wanna have a clear vision. I wanna know kind of what the myth is and what's more like fact to the extent there is any such thing as a fact.

[19:03]

So that's true of the male lineage. It represents, something deeper than sort of historical truth. So you could imagine how difficult it is to come up with a women's lineage. There isn't anything, there isn't anything kind of definite or concrete. We'll never have the, What's the word I want? Like the authoritative, definite women's lineage. There are a lot of people now doing research. There's going to be a conference probably in 2007 to see about coming up with something, and it'll involve practitioners and scholars, and we'll see if we can agree on something.

[20:08]

And in the process, tease out a lot more information because there is a lot of information and it's being, now it's being translated. There's somebody, I think she's in China right now. She's looking at, she's going to cemeteries and reading gravestones because the gravestones had some history written on, you know, it wasn't just like dates. We have a little history. So she's going there. I have this idea. that in women's monasteries in China, and maybe Japan as well, there's probably a lot of material tucked away somewhere, gathering dust, that people didn't know about and or don't have, the women don't have the time and the money and the resources to go, you know, to free up somebody to go searching through the archives.

[21:11]

But that's changing. And I think it's probably also true in Japan, and that's changing too. You know, the women's monasteries in Japan are not so well supported, which is an interesting thing. Grace talks about this, that they've had to find a way to support themselves, and so they work in the world in some way. They take in foster children and they do crafts and things like that. So their practice has an aspect that's a little more like our practice in the sense of being like lay practice. Because they're not supported so well. So if you have to I don't think they make jam, but you have to make jam in order to make a living. You know, you make jam and you sit your Zazen and you do your chanting and so on. And if you're lucky, you study a little bit. That's it. You don't have time to go rooting around in the basement and looking to see what you might find.

[22:20]

But that's changing. That's changing. There's much more money now. for research, there's more, I don't know, probably women Buddhist scholars or scholars of women in Buddhism would probably start laughing if I say there's much more money now. But there's more money now. There's some money now. So there's something flowering here. And we're pioneers of it. You know, and I'm very happy about this. We'll see. We'll see. But we're starting. We're starting. And at Berkeley, we're starting. We're looking at changing the Women Ancestor Chant to include Chinese women, Japanese women, and to take another look at the Indian women.

[23:24]

because the Acharya list is actually like everybody Susan Mercott could find, kind of. And they're not necessarily senior teachers. So that list shrinks a little. There were certain women that were designated as, she speaks for the Buddha, something like that. So those women are included. And then Chinese and Japanese women, and Ruth Fuller Sasaki, and Zhou Xinsan is the last one, She's listed as Great Teacher Joshin on the chant that we'll do at noon service. But I always think of her as Joshin-san. That's how Blanche refers to her. She was a Japanese priest who studied with Uchiyama Roshi. You may have heard of him. He's the one, he did a lot of translating Dogen into modern Japanese and then writing commentaries. So if you've read From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment, otherwise known as Refining Your Life, that commentary is his.

[24:30]

Opening the Hand of Thought, he did a commentary on the Bendo Wa. Anyway, he was a wonderful teacher and she was his student. But she came over to San Francisco Zen Center to teach sewing. And she taught Blanche how to sew raksus and okesas. And that's where our sewing tradition comes from, comes from her teaching. So she's very much our ancestor. I think it was Category's idea to do that, by the way. So we'll chant these People in some form, I mean, this is a thing, work in progress, I think it's going to the practice committee, is that right? Or I'm not sure where it sits. This is the next stop, and nothing's been decided.

[25:33]

Okay, well, then we can talk about this in this afternoon. Anyway, we're working on this, and it won't get, assuming that the chant changes, it won't get set in concrete. It's going to keep on changing for a while and then at some point we'll just settle on something. At least, you know, as settled as anything ever gets. But we need to always remember, remember the gaps. Buddhism through history has been subject to oppression. You know, there were times in China where the temples were all closed down and the monks scattered and the bells melted down or whatever. There's also, office politics happens.

[26:34]

And misogyny also happens. So women would have established a lineage and then it would disappear in a couple of generations. And you just, you get to imagine to some extent how difficult it must have been in these cultures and these societies to just to train, to become a monk or a nun and to establish oneself as a teacher when You know, you're supposed to be well behaved and take a back seat and basically take care of the men in the group, I guess. So the women we do know about are extraordinary women, but they keep falling off.

[27:45]

We keep falling off the table. falling out of knowledge. And I have a little email essay that Sally Tisdale, Jiko Sally Tisdale wrote. And she mentions a woman named Zenshin. In the 500s in Japan, she was actually the very first Japanese person ordained as a Zen priest. She went to, as a teenager, she went to Korea to study Zen. And then she came back to Japan. And Sally Tuesdale says that, you know, people in universities and temples and museums in Japan don't know, nowadays, you know, they don't know her name. And they know a lot about the history of Buddhism in Japan at that time, but they don't know her name. And think of, she was a teenager, female, she had to travel.

[28:55]

Think of what that must have, what the determination that that must have taken. And you could imagine what people, a lot of people would have thought of her. She was unnatural. Something, certainly obnoxious. So as women, there's a way in which the gaps are our story. So we need to own the gaps and fill them in, in some sense, with our heart, our imaginations. Know that for the ones we do know, There must be a lot whom we don't know. That's true for the men as well, but it's much more true, I think, for women.

[29:58]

We're working to fill in those gaps. People are doing research and so on, but we're not going to know everybody. And then there are ones we know and we don't even know their names, the tea ladies. We had two in the lineage that we chanted. I don't know, I don't remember if they made it into this list. Oh, okay. One of them is Straight Ahead Tea Lady and she was the one that taught Chow Chow to go straight ahead. And Moon Cakes Tea Lady who taught Dushan, Mr. Diamond Sutra. You know, he was a scholar And he was going to come teach these Zen people in the South how little they know, these people that relied on meditation.

[31:04]

And on his way, he ran into her and she said, what do you do? And he said, well, I'm a scholar of the Diamond Sutra. The cart there is full of commentaries. She said, oh, in the Diamond Sutra it says, past mind cannot be got at, present mind cannot be got at, future mind cannot be got at. If you can answer my question, I'll give you these mooncakes here. I said, okay. She said, okay, so past, present, future mind cannot be got at. With what mind do you take these tea cakes? And he was completely taken aback and could not answer her. And then he asked where the local Zen master was and she pointed in the way. And he had this awakening experience in the middle of the night that night.

[32:08]

But it seems to me that she started him on the way. It was she who planted that seed that then grew probably through the night as he talked with the Zen master and then the Zen master blew out the lantern as he was going to bed and boom, he woke up. But that was the flowering of that seed. She planted it. She got his attention. And then you could imagine in our modern terms, in his subconscious, it was stirring around. Boom, it was ready to, the shoot broke through. But somebody had to plant the seed and she did. These are our ancestors and we just need to use our imagination a little bit to remember them.

[33:10]

You know, in the stories, that story is in the Koan books. Right, so she's recognized in that way, but they don't say she woke him up. They also don't say her name, but they don't say she woke him up. They say that, and I forget who it was that blew out the lantern, but at any rate, that that person, that Zen master man, guy, woke him up. Well, You have to step back a little bit and look at it and say, oh, right. She had a lot to do with it. So using our imagination, but again, including the gaps. I think it's really important to to remember the shadow.

[34:15]

Sally Tisdale says that lineage is the absolute expressed as the relative, which I think is a good way of understanding it. And the relative has these gaps, includes the shadow. includes sexism, includes misogyny. So there's something kind of wonderful about the fact of the gaps in the sense that that's reality, that's her story. And our job is to learn our story and to learn how to tell it to ourselves.

[35:25]

Because you could say our job is to own our story and not have somebody else tell it to us, but find a way to tell it ourselves. Doesn't mean we all have to become scholars of this. but paying attention to it and taking ownership of it and supporting one another to learn about these wonderful women that do belong to us. So coming back full circle, they're remembering that they do belong to us, that they're not separate from us. You can read, there's a book called The Lives of the Nuns about nuns in medieval China. And you could read all those stories, and there are a number of them that you would not identify with, probably.

[36:27]

They were heavy into purity, some of them, and they ate a lot of incense and incense oil and burned themselves up. It's not an attractive image to me. It's a whole other lecture about purity and so on and what they were kind of responding to, to this something about women as impure. So I nod to it and it's very, very sad to me. And it's also part of our story. However, those are not the ones that I would identify with. But there are others that if you read their stories, you'll think, oh, I know her. But in some sense, all of them are mine.

[37:37]

I am all of those women. I am all of the ancestors, male and female. But these women are the ones that I need to remember because they particularly encourage my practice. And because they're the ones that have been forgotten. They've been in the shadow. And so I want to include them because practice for me is at the base about wanting to know what is. And they are. And they have been ignored. So I want to know them. because they are mine and they're yours. They're ours. We are they. So at noon service, we'll chant the homage to the Prajnaparamita.

[38:40]

We'll all chant it together. And that means without punctuation. And then we'll do lineage chant. I thought I'd put it in here. I guess I didn't. Thank you. There is a copy next to me. Anyway, we will chant them. This is the work in progress. Lori and I decided that we would try doing it with Great Teacher first, so Great Teacher Mahapajapati, Great Teacher Damodina, and so on, through this list. And it ends with Great Teacher Joshin. If any of you want it, you can let me know.

[39:42]

I have the email that it's Jiko Sally. Sally Tisdale is an author. I don't know if you know. She writes about many different things. She's had articles in the New Yorker and written books and so on. She's a writer. And she's soon to be ordained up in Portland. Anyway, I have a copy of that email if you're interested. It's very much from her heart. She has a book coming out very soon about women's lineage where she's written stories about these women. So she's used her imagination to some extent. It's based on research, but she has then imagined them in their context and then, you know, and written a story about each one. So that should be coming out.

[40:44]

I think it's coming up very soon, but I think by the end of this year, she says that she has a book coming out, a book coming out in a few months, and that was written in August. So, so So it's a little bit after 11 and I'm going to stop and I'm sorry about questions. But we have I think about an hour for tea and discussion this afternoon so we can talk about this, about women's lineage or whatever comes up for people. Did you want to say anything about any of this? The Yanks are numberless.

[41:42]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ