to be back at our Women's Sitting. And usually we kind of spread, the Women's Sitting is a nice time for different people to get used to doing different jobs and doing things first and giving talks first. And so it's nice to spread that around. But I said I'd give the talk today because, although I've given it, given talks in this women's sitting several times because I'm going to be leaving and this may not, I may not have this chance again. And it does remind me of the time when I gave the first talk, which was in 1991, when we had the first women sitting. And that was a very controversial event. I think it took about a year to work up to it. And so what I want to talk about today is partly, is that

[01:07]

how my practice as a woman and how women's practice in the Sangha has ripened. So, leaving home and coming home We talk about both those aspects of practice, leaving home, leaving the habits and enclosures of our mind. And as we do that, coming home in the larger sense. And as I prepare this move, having lived in the same house for thirty-three years and practiced here for twenty-eight years I am appreciating just trying to appreciate what this change is.

[02:16]

You know, sometimes life is very stable and it doesn't seem like anything's happening and the change factor is buried deep in the ground. And then other times this change, and how does one, how do we keep grounded in the midst of that change? So I want to talk in the context of this quite famous Zen koan, which I've talked about before, and so have others, and I first heard from Maureen Stewart. Chen and her soul are separated. It's from one of the koans in the Blue Cliff Record. Sometimes that's the title. Chen and her soul are separated. And that's really our greatest affliction, you know, when we are, when we have, when we feel that we are separated from our spiritual being.

[03:26]

And another title for this koan is, Which is the True Chen? So there's a little statement before the case, and then a comment, and then the verse, and then I will tell the story, which probably many of you have heard. But the first statement is, Watsu asked a monk, the woman Chen and her spirit separated Which is the true Chen? And then there's a comment. If you realize the true one, then you'll know that emerging from one husk and entering another is like a traveler putting up at an inn. If this is still not clear, don't rush about recklessly. When you suddenly separate into earth, fire, water, and air, you'll be like a crab dropped into boiling water, struggling with your seven hands and eight legs. Don't say, I never told you so.

[04:30]

And then there's a final verse. The moon and the clouds are the same. Mountains and valleys are different. All are blessed. All are blessed. Is this one or is this two? So the story, and it's more, is taken from a Chinese folk tale. And it goes that Chen and her brother lived with Chen's father. And her mother died. So her father invited the brother, her cousin, to come and live with them so that they could be more of a little family. And Chen and her cousin grew up together and got along extremely well. So well that the father noticed and one day in a casual way said, well, you two get along so well you'll probably end up being married.

[05:38]

And they kind of assumed that that would be the case. But when Chen became a marriageable age, her father told her that now he had selected a husband. And Chen and her cousin, Chuan, were totally dismayed and didn't know what to do. And Chuan realized that he could not live with Chen in the family anymore if she were living with a husband. So he, one evening, got on a barge to sail out of the hamlet into a larger city and disappear. And as the barge was pulling along the canal, he was amazed to see Chen running after it.

[06:41]

She ran after it and vaulted into it. And so Chen and her cousin went off to a distant city and were married and quite happy and had two children. But after a while, Chen began to miss her father. and her family in her native town, and so did her cousin. And they decided that they would go back and see if they could make peace and heal that separation that they felt. So they went back and they agreed that Chuan would go first to the father, his uncle's house, and say that Chen is coming so that the father wouldn't be too surprised and dismayed. So he did.

[07:43]

He knocked on his uncle's door and the uncle opened the door and was amazed. Chuan, you disappeared! I missed you so. I'm so glad that you've come back. And Chuan was a little surprised, but he said, well, you know, I went off with Chen, and we are married, and we have two children, and we've come back to see you. And the uncle shook his head and said, that's not possible. Ever since you left, Chen has been in her bed, unconscious, in a kind of coma. She hasn't spoken. And at that moment, Chen, the wife, entered the door of her father's house and Chen, who had been lying in the bed, rose up and the two walked towards one another and embraced and became one.

[08:47]

So the question is, which one is the true champion? Katherine Thanos, who is the teacher in Monterey and Santa Cruz Zen Centers, wrote a lovely commentary on this in the last newsletter. And I made a copy for everybody, and it's on the telephone table in the community room, and you can read it. over the years talking to Catherine, who's about 10 years older than I am, and a kind of older sister and mentor for me, talking to Catherine about this koan has been very, very helpful as it has been talking about my life with her. So how do we practice

[09:57]

in this very complicated world where so often we have conflicting aspects in our life. This koan, as I think about it, can be taken on two levels. It can be taken on the level of plot, the story, that often we are in a situation and it's all right and then some kind of appetite arises and we have to pay attention for that appetite and it takes us somewhere and it's fine but then after a while we begin to feel dislocated And how do we investigate that, that dislocation?

[11:05]

And then how do we use that sense of being separated, being somewhat alienated, somewhat distanced? How do we use that sense to come back home, to find a larger integration, to find a more inclusive, integration. So, as we are able to do this, we are able to live out our path. That's what our Dharma path is about. Coming from a sense of kind of innocent wholeness you know, children as they play, are totally innocent and whole, at least when they're quite little. But they're also untested, they're unstable.

[12:09]

They're little rudders, flap. So, we come from that. but our life is a series of choices and adventures and misadventures. But how do we use that path sense to move amongst the alternatives and to return to ever and ever increasing wholeness? This circle of practice enlightenment that we live in the midst of. So one level of this story is the plot, the path of our lives. And you can't look ahead and know what the plot is, but we have way-seeking mind talks here frequently.

[13:13]

and people are able to discern some kind of path that their life has taken. And if you give a way-seeking mind talk a year later, you discern a slightly different path. Because it's always, your view, one's view of the past and the future is always shifting too. So, it's a wonderfully, it's a very free path. It never gets fixed. And the other way to think about this story is just from the point of view of our day-to-day, moment-to-moment, zazen period, zazen period experience. How we move so quickly from feeling grounded and whole to our quandaries and obsessions and griefs and angers and how we return.

[14:17]

That's what zazen is about. Being in the present moment and leaving it and coming back. So strange that we continuously leave what we most desire again and again and again. That's our condition. and again and again and again we return, and that process of leaving and losing and returning is how we reframe our lives. How we reframe our lives from the grasping, from the greedy, from the controlling point of view, to the point of view of gift. So I'd like to tell a little bit the story of my life from the point of view of Chen and her spirit are separated.

[15:25]

When I was a little girl, I just had my 64th birthday, say 60 years ago, I think probably when I was four or five I began to perceive that it was a man's world. Women of my generation, it's just different, you know, it's a different world from my daughter's world, and for most of you here. Each generation, we have a different situation. But it was very clear to me, it was a man's world. And I actually, you know, there was a saying that if you could kiss your elbow, you could change your sex. Well, I really tried. And it seemed to me that my father, we lived in commuting distance, Westchester County from Manhattan, and my father would put on his three-piece suit every day and go into the office, and my mother would struggle to save money and keep house in the rather somewhat pretentious house, I think, that we had, and wash all the laundry by hand.

[16:35]

And it was clear that being a woman was being trapped. And then I went to college in 1952, and I went to Radcliffe, and that was a very exciting, very exciting, very stimulating place. I had one woman teacher in four years, And it was, I was just always trying, essentially, to think like men. And none of us women talked about what we were going to do after college, except that we'd get married. Very few went on and had any kind of ambition. So, trying to be like a man and never quite making it. and then getting married the day after I graduated, and having my first child when I was 23, and kind of crashing what had all this education been about.

[17:46]

Apparently nothing, you know, babies and diapers. And then when my children began going to a cooperative nursery school in Berkeley, I began to hear about feminism in the early 60s, and things began to change. And I realized that I needed to do something else besides being a mother, and so I began to get a master's in social work. And I began to work in 1969 for Alameda County Mental Health. And I began to practice in Berkeley Zen Center in 1971. And that was when things began to change. And that was when, that was kind of the beginning of finding myself as a woman in different ways. At work, all the administrative positions were then, in 69, held by men.

[18:50]

When I left in 1985, almost all of them were held by women. And when I began to study Zen in 1971, all the teachers... all the teachers were men. And... Now there's a considerable difference. And most of the administrative posts, probably more than 50% of the administrative posts, Rebecca's nodding, are held by women. And some people say that women are taking over Zen Center. So something has been going on and I, and all of us have been finding our voices. So in 1971, when I began to practice, we weren't even beginning, we were in Dwight Way, and we didn't even, we didn't have one-day sittings even.

[19:54]

We'd all get into cars and go over to San Francisco Zen Center and sit. So it was like Berkeley was this kind of little country cousin, you know, straw sticking out of its hair. And from my point of view, Richard Baker was the big teacher. So I sat a lot of sessions, seven days sessions at Green Gulch, in a very macho kind of way. It was a macho practice then. You sat, you know, beyond. If you had any kind of aspiration, you didn't just go to bed at 9.30, you stayed up for another hour or two. The whole mood was much more that way, and I just loved it. It was such an escape. It was an escape for me, and it was an adventure, and I just loved it. And once again, every teacher was a man, and it was the same feeling as when I'd been in college.

[21:01]

You know, I could do it pretty well, but this feeling, don't think I can ever do it right. And I remember speaking to Reb way back about it was confusing that there weren't women teachers. And he said, well, you know, if you play hardball, you have to play hardball. And the women can't come to every Sesshin. And they can't come to every practice period, every Zazen period. And so the people who do are the teachers. Yeah? I could see that. And so, as I say, Berkeley seemed kind of small and out of it, and Mel was very plain and very low-key. He was finding his voice, actually, as a teacher back then,

[22:02]

And I didn't realize what a gift that was. It began to dawn on me later. And I don't remember the year that we moved from Dwight Way to here, but it was probably since Daniel's 16, it was probably about 17 years ago. And I'd been tuning in more and more to the Sangha at Dwight Way as my kids got somewhat older and I had a little more time. And I was president at the time that we moved from there to here. And that was a big move. I mean, we moved from being a little family with money kept in a coffee can and meetings not run by anybody in particular to this place where we put down a lot of money and money really changes things. And it was all this great energy and appetite and I remember the first community meeting we had was upstairs where the Samakhis are living now, and it was very big and crowded.

[23:08]

And I was facilitating it, and the style had been a kind of non-facilitating style. But that meeting, everybody had ideas and anxieties, and there were conflicts, and it just sort of blew up and went out of control. I realized that everything was different and I was president and I knew how to chair meetings. I'd done it at work. So, the Sangha began to find its voice and its process. And I and others began to find our voices too. We began to take responsibility for the ground here. And I think that the great jewel of this Sangha is its Sangha, that it's a lay temple, and that year after year, seventeen or so years now, we have been carefully working out and articulating our process.

[24:15]

And when you look around at other groups, it takes time, you know, and we're very lucky to have done that. been able to do that, and we were very lucky to have been so sheltered by Mel, our teacher, who didn't have any great catastrophe, and there was no great wounding, and we just had a kind of protected space to grow and to find who we were. So, I think that that Sangha process is something that is very American and unique and unique to us and unique to our family. The larger centers have also, are also discovering it and using it well. And it's very, you know, it's a step away from hierarchy. And it is a container, that process, where all of us can find our voices, and women do, very wonderfully.

[25:25]

So that was a big step. And then some years later, I don't exactly remember when, we had our first Jukai. And we had it in here, and Richard Baker presided because Mel had not had Dharma transmission, and the floor here wasn't finished. We sort of were on It was the, you know, the underbeams and sheets of plywood had been put over it, so it was very, very raw and it was very exciting, you know. It was a new step. So, first, ordination. Juhkai. You know, these ordinations are really important. How we have joined into the process of the Sangha and in that body how we meet our ancestors and how our ancestors meet us. And how we sew ourselves into that process, stitch by stitch.

[26:35]

Namo kyei butsu, I throw myself into Buddha. Sewing and sewing, you know, it's a very, very wonderful concrete manifestation of the practice. You don't know what it's going to look like. You think it may well be a terrible failure, and there's all kinds of drama in it, and then it turns out. And actually, everybody's Rakasu looks pretty much like everybody else's. And they all seem to turn out. And what seemed like a very personal adventure you see clearly is a Sangha, is a personal adventure and it's also a Sangha expression and an expression of the ancestors. So there was that first Jukai which I was pretty ambivalent about because why should some people wear robes and others not?

[27:37]

But Mel was really keen on it and did it, and then of course it's such an incredible gift once you've done it, and this sense of entering and being received. And then my next step was to retire when I was fifty, after sixteen years of full-time work, And I didn't exactly know what I was doing, but I knew it was time to make a change and to stop and just to be quiet, because I had been with three children and a full-time job and a lot of participation here, just running for years and years. So I just stopped.

[28:38]

And it was clear that practice, that now I had, there was an opportunity to enter more deeply into practice. And Fran Tribe and I were ordained as priests in either 88 or 89. And that was, that ordination was wonderful. The difference between the priest and the jukai ordination is that when you get received tokadou, you promise to leave home. So that your fundamental, clear vow is to leave the small, the narrow mind, to open the heart. to let the myriad things come forward and confirm the self, rather than putting the self forward.

[29:44]

Many ways of saying that. And of course there's the cloth, there's the cotton robe, and there's the invisible robe. And many of us, all of us, wear the invisible robe. And if the invisible robe isn't there, the cotton robe means nothing. So Fran and I were ordained, and that was a wonderful time, occasion for me to really begin to feel my true identity as a woman, stepping into that position of visible authority in this woman's body, now ready to do that. And because in my life I'd left my work and I was leaving my marriage, I was free.

[30:44]

So I guess in that freedom moved towards the question, the bigger question of how do we awaken with all beings? how do we use this practice in the world? What is Zen in action? And how do we hold, how do we move into the suffering of the world and hold that suffering close in our hearts and feel it as we're now feeling the situation in Yugoslavia? and not let it drown us and not let it silence us but find our voice and find what we can do and find some action that we can take with other people. So that became

[31:51]

Along with being here, that became what I studied in a number of different ways. Protesting bombs, and doing hospice work, and doing homeless work, and doing prison work. Joining up with the Buddhist Peace Fellowship groups, and working base groups, working with them. I think that that's the next frontier for us now that these 40 years we've established the practice. Now, how do we embody that practice? How do we begin to find the forms of embodying that practice in the larger community? And then, last year, Alan and I received Dharma transmission from Mel at Tassajara, meaning that we are independent teachers.

[33:00]

And that was kind of, that brought this search of, who is this woman, to a new place. This wonderfully generous a private ceremony that goes on for a week at Tassajara, where you are joined to the ancestors, a great deal of chanting, and chanting to the male ancestors, and for the first time in the ceremony, chanting to the female ancestors, the acharya. So who are these ancestors? Who are these friends and allies? Who are the helpers, that cloud of helpers that have brought all of us to where we are? How do we open our hearts and feel their help, allow their help?

[34:03]

The men, we chant, and the women. And we all know that there's this crowd of kind of faceless women who have been our mothers and teachers and forebears. It's kind of like Seicho lying asleep on her bed. This part of our practice, this background of our practice that is unknown and that yet moves us powerfully So, the rest of the story is to come. But I feel very grateful to have been able to have been so healed in this gender, in this gender war.

[35:14]

There is a kind of gender war that's still going on. and we're all wounded by it in various ways. But to find some healing and to find some strength within it using the wounding to find our voice and find our ground. Very, very grateful that this practice could help that so much. So, that's all I want to say. And if you have any responses or questions, that's fine. Oh no, it's not quite. I wanted to read again the verse at the end. The moon and the clouds are the same. Mountains and valleys are different. All are blessed.

[36:15]

All are blessed. Is this one? Is this two? Yeah, well I've been thinking about that. In recent weeks I've been feeling a kind of pool of terror. And I kind of welcome that because that's part of the process that I need to go through. But also feeling as if the walls of this Zen Do are very expandable, you know, and I am so much part of this practice that Arcada cannot be separate. And I do hope that people will come up and I will certainly come down and that will be a feeling of one practice place.

[37:24]

Well, I have the experience that I usually do when you talk of just hearing every word and being very present and as long as I can remember I've never been able to have that experience in listening to a male. Unlike yourself, I was never able to do the, in my education and in my life, learn from men. And I feel, given the world that I live in, despite the fact that it's changing, it's a limitation. And in a way, thinking of the story, there's a way I abandon myself. But I don't have changes. I feel like it's still so present with me. It changed for me when there were more books written by women, and I rediscovered reading.

[38:37]

So I don't know if there are any thoughts that you can give me at this time. I really want to bridge that. I feel like I know that there's a lot to learn from male teachers. And there are occasions where somehow a man's style is more intuitive. And I know that male is very intuitive. But there's still a way that I've just abandoned my process of listening just without Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that that's very important to be right at that place, you know, when Chen had left and she had the children and then this feeling came of she had abandoned part of herself. I mean, that's the gate. What does that mean?

[39:39]

What does that mean? And what are you excluding? Maybe somebody else can speak to that. And just noticing, noticing what you're excluding. I mean, the exclusions are only in the mind. And as you watch them, That's when the openings come. I wonder whether the excludings are only in mind.

[40:42]

Recently I've had some experiences, which I'll talk to you about, of being in... I've been tossed out of a few organizations in my day for being mouthy and opinionated and unskillful in asking difficult questions and that kind of thing. And recently I've had the experience of being where for whatever reason I don't seem to frighten people quite so much. And maybe it's because I've learned grace, more grace. And maybe it's because of the nature of the particular organizations. But I find that that experience is working a very kind of subtle shift in me in some way where I feel kind of grounded or settled and it's somehow easier to find my voice.

[41:57]

And so while I understand what you're saying about the exclusions that are in the mind and that there isn't anything outside the mind, it is important, I think, to have an environment and people around that are supportive That too, I think, is really necessary to help us find it. Right. Right. I mean, one does have to leave a place that one can't be whole in and be skillful in finding a place that is more receptive. Yeah, and we have our individual minds and we also have our cultural minds pretty hard. They're very connected and they work back and forth. But we need support very much.

[43:00]

Right, right, right. I speak here for myself as well as for a number of women that I work with professionally. And that is, I work with and have experienced tremendous abuse, sexual, physical, sexual, from men. And the work, as in this story, back to the self, is so painful. The recognition of the abuse, the anger about the abuse, the grief and mourning that follows all of that. For many people, the work is too difficult and it's easier to stay in the place that's more defined by the patriarchy because there is some safety there. And I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit to that process. Yeah. Well, our society is oppressive in many ways. And it's sad.

[44:06]

It's sad when we're caught in that kind of oppression and just don't feel the support or the inner strength to move out of it and are narrowed. And we can see that in ourselves and we can look around and see it in others and it's painful. Yeah. And hopefully It arouses our compassion. Those of us who have not been, have been fortunate in not being so pinned, and so that is our work. It was very painful. Yeah. These things are so subtle for me, that they come up in a very strange way.

[45:18]

And last night, I had a very strong dream. And in the dream, I realized that I was being sacrificed on the altar of cooking. Sort of a true dream. And in this dream was this very determined, I'm done with this role. But at the same time, I mean, I grew up in a family where my mother became the head of a big, a vice president of a big corporation. If you do that, I'll break your arm first. None of my daughter is going to spend her life emptying bedpans. If you want to be something, you can be a doctor. So I had, you know, intellectually a much different push.

[46:18]

But then, of course, I ended up in a teacher's role, which is the role that most women end up in as a transition. My ego is still involved in making sure that everybody has good food. At some level, I don't, and my husband cooks. We have people living with us who cook. But I want to be in control of the quality of the food. because someplace my idea of who I am is tied up with that. Yeah, well that's a very nice example of how we're caught. Yeah.

[47:10]

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