Good morning. What a surprise. Thank you for coming. My talk this morning is about two things, Buddha, Dharma, Sangha, the three treasures, and Sangha, particularly Sangha through the lens of feminism. We know, of course, Buddha, Dharma, Sangha as the three treasures, the three jewels, in which we find, we Buddhists find our home,

[01:01]

You take refuge in these three treasures. Buddhists all over the world do that, and have been doing that for 2,000 years at least. We take refuge in Buddha. We take refuge in Dharma. We take refuge in Sangha. In Buddha as the perfect teacher, in Dharma as the perfect teaching, in Sangha as the perfect light. Earlier this week, during Shosan, Meili asked Sojin a question about Sangha. And he seemed to play hide-and-seek. He said, well, when you say Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha is included. When you say Dharma, Buddha, and Sangha is included. When you say Sangha, Buddha, and Dharma is included. And I can only agree with that, of course.

[02:07]

But I think I will risk unfolding it so we can have something more to play with. Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, each of those words has a multitude of meanings and a depth of meaning. In the mundane sense, of course, Buddha is our teacher, refers to the historical Siddhartha, prince of the Shakya tribe, who became the Buddha, the enlightened one, about 2,500 years ago. The Dharma refers to his teachings or to the law of the universe. And Sangha is the Originally the community of monastic practicers and shortly thereafter referred to more generally the community of Buddhist practitioners.

[03:10]

In an absolute sense Buddha refers to the truth of our human nature by saying not just our human nature but all beings by nature are Buddha. Dharma in an absolute sense refers to the vast and fathomless universe which is void yet charged with energy such that moment by moment from the emptiness the form of beings and things emerge and fall back into emptiness moment by moment. Sangha refers in the absolute sense to the kinship of all beings and everything everything in this world, in our universe. So in this kind of deconstruction, it is beings that is the common beings, with a Z on the end, which is the common element in each of these three of the trinity, of the jewel-like trinity that we take refuge in.

[04:25]

Beings being people, of course. one-by-one-by-one individuals alone together on people. So coming down from these very lofty heights to refer now to Sangha in the mundane sense as the community of Buddhist practitioners and even more parochially I want to talk about lay practitioners which is how we could be described. Last time I spoke about sangha as a matrix, that is to say as a situation or substance in which something else develops or originates. So sangha as a matrix of both moral conduct and spiritual practice and spiritual learning. And this latter

[05:26]

refers to companionship on the path, fellow and sister refugees, each of us, friends who provide feedback, which is as vital to our learning process as the teacher himself or herself is. Chogyam Trungpa talked about the sangha is people being alone together, willing to work with their aloneness in a group. And of the lay sangha, which was gathering around him, coming together some 30 years ago in San Francisco, Suzuki Roshi left us a remark and an observation. He said, it's easy to see that you're not priests, but you're not exactly lay people either. He said, you are on your way to discovering some appropriate way of life. I think that is our zen. our Zen community, our group.

[06:28]

So what is it that we are discovering? I think it's easy to say that there have been two outstanding innovations in the Western lay Buddhist communities. They're closely related, but we can talk, identify them separately. Sangha in our time and place, has provided the means for a serious and disciplined lay practice. And it has also provided an opening and encouragement for the participation of women. Both of these are quite extraordinary innovations compared with the legacy that we received from Deja, the 2,500 year old legacy, in which lay people were generally regarded as the means of support for the monastics. They could gain merit, lay people, by supporting monastics, both with actual money and with food, providing with food as they came around with their begging bowls.

[07:44]

But in our time, lay people want to do the practice itself, not merely to support monastics, but to participate full-heartedly in the practice of meditation, and in the study of the sutras, and in participation in sangha. And as for the participation of women, that's really an extraordinary innovation, and it's I think we've probably all heard or read that the Dharma is neither male nor female. That's a kind of easy one. Nor, of course, is Buddha nature either male or female. And in the absolute sense that I spoke a moment ago, nor is the Sangha in this absolute sense of the kinship of all living beings male or female. But in practical terms, when Sangha is a community of people,

[08:52]

Historically, it must and it has reflected the culture or the society of which it is a sumset. And from first historic times to this very day, Sangha has been largely dominated by male culture. Patriarchy has been the order of the day. I was reminded when I made a note of that of what my mama told me. She said, Dalek, it's a man's world, and you're going to have to learn to deal with that. All the things I wanted to do, she'd say, oh, okay. And I'd complain, want to rebel, and she'd tell me in the kindest way she knew that it's a man's world. I think all young girls hear that and find that out. So this patriarchy is still the order of the day in our society at large. And certainly if we look at the history of Buddhism, I'd like to just briefly go back and give some of those points.

[10:00]

But if we look at it through a feminist lens, we'll see just how great an innovation is the participation of women in our time. And then we'll just take a moment and look around us here in Berkeley and see where we are in feminist terms. and what may yet remain to be accomplished. And I want to say that much of what I am going to speak about, and am speaking about, I take from this book, Buddhism After Patriarchy, by Rita Gross, who is a professor of comparative religion at the University of Wisconsin, and a longtime practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, Tantric Buddhism. Chojong Trungpa was her teacher for many years. This book, Buddhism After Patriarchy, was published in 1993, and the subtitle is, A Feminist History Analysis and Reconstruction of Buddhism.

[11:03]

It's quite a heavy duty read, but worth your while. I absolutely have to start off here with a definition of feminism. before I get misunderstood. There's a few ways in which she really grows through this. It is an academic method of some rigor, which has been practiced by feminist scholars for the last three or four decades. It is also a social vision. And she herself gives a definition where, in the Buddhist context, When she says feminism, and when I say it in the next moments, it refers to a radical practice or the radical practice of the co-humanity of women and men. It doesn't seem so revolutionary. The co-humanity of women and men.

[12:04]

And then referring to the Buddhist cosmology, she points out the obvious. There is no separate realm for women. in the Buddhist cosmology. In fact, the sutras tell us that a precious human body, free and well favored, difficult to obtain, easy to lose. Just a precious human body. Only those born into the human realm have a chance to practice the Dharma and realize its fruits. In early I think we all have heard some version of the story, very well known and oft told in the Buddhist world, about how some few years after the Buddha had his realization and began to teach, his foster mother, Maha Prajapati, came to him and requested that women also be allowed to join his order.

[13:11]

And he said no. And she came back a second time and he said no. And when she came back a third time, Ananda, who was the Buddha's attendant and cousin, as it happens, intervened, interceded on behalf of Mahaprajapati. And at that time, the Buddha agreed. that indeed women could become home leavers and practice his way. In so doing, he responded when Ananda asked him, isn't it the truth or isn't it so, Lord, that women as well as men can find the Buddha way? And he agreed to that. So there was never any question in the beginning about a woman's ability to pursue and achieve the Nirvana, which was the goal of early Indian Buddhism. How could there be, really? There's no question about that.

[14:14]

There was a coda added to this little story, which most of us have also heard, which to the effect that the Buddha responded after agreeing that women could join the order. He responded that because of this, Buddhism would last 500 years instead of 1,000. proved to be something added, according to scholarly research, many hundreds of years later, added to this story. And in fact, it was added at a time when Buddhism was under a good deal, early Indian Buddhism was under a good deal of pressure from the rise of Mahayana Buddhism, which in fact takes a very different view about women, which I'll talk about in a moment. So it's just not true, according to historical scholarship, that the Buddha himself added this bit about somehow that the admission of women was going to affect in a negative way.

[15:24]

We can ask, as Rita Gross asked, well why was it? Why was he so hesitant in the beginning to admit women to the order? And her response, which I think is satisfactory, is that it was too unconventional. It was too much against the grain of the society in which he lived and practiced. The historical Buddha was not, in fact, a social revolutionary of any kind. It was not his issue, as she put it, to right any injustices wrongs arising in society. And indeed, the early texts do give us many occasions, tell of many occasions when the Buddha talked directly to women and often praised them for their accomplishments and achievements.

[16:27]

One phrase, and be it woman, be it man, for whom such chariot doth wait by that same car into Nirvana's presence shall they come. However, most of the early chroniclers much preferred talking about laywomen, especially the pious and generous ones who supported the monastics with much abundance. And they were preferred to the home-leaving nuns. And in fact, in 1968, Just a few years ago, relatively speaking, there was a 500-page Buddhist anthology in which this same kind of prejudice is shown, where the author, one Henry Clark Warren, devoted 30 pages to one particular famous laywoman, Vishakha, and six pages to the early nuns.

[17:30]

So again, this patriarchal gloss on the history of early Buddhism shows itself. We have, however, the great good fortune to have preserved from these early times a collection called the Therigatha, which means the hymns of liberation of female elders, or these early nuns. Liberation referring to both spiritual and social liberation. Here's one I copied down which I thought we would all enjoy. I'm free, totally free in freedom from those three hideous shapes, my grindstone, my pestle, and my hunchback husband. I'm free from birth and death. My ties to life are broken. So then to move more quickly through the subsequent development of Buddhism and the movements or the epics that we call Mahayana and then Vajrayana, these same tensions between the doctrinal acknowledgement of the co-humanity of women and men, a tension exists with that and the conventional

[19:02]

cultural assertions of male prerogative and privilege, ascribing otherness to women, which already sounds like anti-theoretical to the Buddhist understanding of nature. In Mahayana texts, for instance, there is a widespread use found by scholars of gender-inclusive and even some gender-specific language which refers to good daughters as well as good sons. Good daughters or sons referring to those who have taken Bodhisattva vows. And to good friends, who could be women or men, who are people who taught. Such as, for instance, in a famous sutra, a laywoman, Queen Srimala, is praised very highly and sometimes even described as a female Buddha. So potent and effective was her teaching. There's another well-known woman practitioner who achieved liberation, and that was Ling Chao, Lei Min Pan's daughter.

[20:17]

We might not know of her except for her father, Lei Min Pan, but we do, and that's nice to know. In China, about 800 AD. So the contradiction between the doctrine And the social reality is an occasion for astonishment, were it not so familiar to us that we tend to just accept it or gloss it over, unless we are informed by the feminist view. Unfortunately, Dr. Gross points out, this is not the only case in world religions in which a symbolic and mythic glorification of femininity coexists with a social reality that sharply limits women. In most such situations, the contradiction is simply not perceived by those who live within the systems." Again, you're blessed with the clarity of a feminist point of view.

[21:24]

I think it might be a moment now to just ask, how are we doing here in Berkeley in this context of feminism? Only one person, I asked the members of the practice period to respond to a very simplified kind of survey about what they like or find useful or helpful about Burkisanga and what they don't like about it, what else they might suggest. And I did receive about 25 responses, and of those, only one said in a list of things that that person, these by the way were anonymous, but only one person said, how can we support more women in leadership roles which I thought was pretty good, that only one person found it an observation worth making.

[22:33]

But in fact, let's just think a moment what women we have in leadership roles already. We have two tantos, one of whom is a woman. We have one director, she's a woman. We have one president of the board, she's a woman. We have a woman as tenzo, we have a woman as sashimi director, and we have a woman as shuso. And I could just add that the position of heijikido, which involves the cleaning of our zendo in a regular way, is a man. altar you see we have an image of Shakyamuni Buddha and directly below a beautiful image of Prajna Paramita and she's depicted as a woman and she was indeed fashioned by a woman sculptor, Rebecca.

[23:40]

On the left we have a male image and on the right we have a female image. And this morning, in our liturgy, we chanted a rather recent addition, which was to pay homage to the list of, a long list of 27, I believe, of these female elders who I mentioned a moment ago. And this morning, it just brought tears to my eyes to repeat those names. And in a regular way, we also pay homage to Mahaprajapati, who I mentioned a moment ago. She's in the list, Buddha, and then Mahaprajapati, and then Manjushri, Avalokiteshvara, et cetera. So she's right there where she belongs.

[24:44]

And we can thank each other. We can certainly thank Meili. The practice committee, composed of course of men and women, and I think above all we can thank Sojin Roshi, who isn't able to be here this morning. When I spoke to him last night and said I was sorry he was going to miss my talk, I said it's on one of your favorite subjects, humanism and Buddhism. But I assured him and I think it's clear from what I'm saying that you don't have to strain or stretch on that. He has been just completely open to and willing and encouraging of these moves, particularly in the liturgy, which I'm not sure, perhaps maybe he could tell us afterward to what extent

[25:50]

These changes have been instituted at the other San Francisco Zen Center or other sanghas that you know of. So we can thank each other and we can thank Sojourn. But again, I don't know what the situation is in the rest of North America or in Europe when it comes to our contemporary lay Buddhist practices. But certainly Rita Gross believes, and I believe with her, that it's absolutely vital for the health of our sangha to, to whatever extent necessary, replace male cultural values, the lonesome cowboy hero, or separation and competitiveness with what she calls feminist, what I might call humanist values of community relationships. nurturance, communication, and friendship. As she points out, unavoidable human aloneness is no excuse for alienation and isolation.

[26:55]

And referring to interdependent co-arising, which is a central concept in Buddhism, as old as the Buddha's first teachings, everything is linked with everything else. And because of this truth, One's acts really do affect others, and their acts affect oneself. Isolation is impossible. Words and deeds really do matter. They don't just have negative karmic effects for oneself later on. They hurt or they help. Relatively speaking, the sanity or insanity of us all is dependent on how we treat each other, because we are interdependent beings, not isolated monads. Whether the Sangha manifests as a matrix of psychological comfort or as an alienated glorifier of loneliness makes a great deal of difference. Such a realization makes very immediate all the emphases in Mahayana Buddhism on kindness, gentleness, and compassion.

[28:00]

These are not only demands on me, they are also what I need to receive from my fellow wayfarers to be able to wake up. And there's one other section I'd like to read from this. Though sanghaship, or being a communicative and supportive sangha member, is critical, it is by no means natural, especially for people trained in a male-dominated culture. Therefore, one must train for it, as surely as one trains to understand the teachings and to develop the mind of awareness and freedom. Buddhism needs to develop disciplines surrounding being a Sangha member and take them seriously, emphasizing these disciplines in the same way that disciplines of meditation and philosophy are emphasized.

[29:04]

To take refuge in the Sangha should mean to join a community of people sensitive to the importance of communication and companionship, and those who aspire to take refuge in the Sangha should aspire to be such companions and friends. I'm just about ready to wind down now. I think that's quite a challenge she poses. She doesn't particularly offer any specifics, but she leaves it to us to think about how we can really add the depth and richness and commitment to our conception and creation of Sangha that seems to be required and called for to help us indeed in the Buddhadharma Sangha trinity. In fact, again referring to these pink sheets which people here of this Sangha gave me,

[30:14]

Many of the respondents asked themselves the questions along the line of, well, how can I participate more fully in the Sangha? Or what can I contribute so that it would be better suited to my needs? Many people said that. And I thought that was very inspiring. People are maybe looking for, and there must be ways that we can bring our thoughts and intentions together and find out how to do that. how to make our Sangha even more responsive and interactive. One person wrote, as long as you approach a community in the context of what you get out of it, you set yourself up for disappointment. If, however, you approach the community with what you can give to it, then it is more likely to find, you are more likely to find the community fulfilling. Well, I'm sure that Kind of obvious, but very helpful to hear expressed that way.

[31:20]

The last comment I want to make is to point out one thing that we did here recently that fits in this context, and that is in response to the feelings of a few people, specifically, and then very much with the cooperation and encouragement of everyone, we had what we called an unlearning racism workshop, a two-day workshop about three or four months ago now, that at least made a beginning on some pernicious effect that is part of our certainly larger society and kind of helped me to some degree here in our sangha. We made a start. Instead of doing, I think one of the main things we did was bring it forth as an issue.

[32:22]

Racism as an issue and as an ugly thing that we wanted to look at and work with to eliminate. And we did work. There were 25 people or so who worked a day and a half. And there are after effects and we still have it in our minds and we are looking for ways to put into action the insights that we gain. That's one small but significant thing that we've done recently in this Sangha and perhaps there are other things that people would like to bring up and talk about or even suggest. That's all I have to say and I invite your comments. Can you tell me about feminism in Arcata or Central Elsewhere too?

[33:34]

Arcadia? Arcadia is so small, it really hasn't come up as an issue. But one other aspect that's very important for me is that if there's not a hierarchy of the sort that we began, That's a big change, and very nourishing to us. And in fact, we exercise that process in our practice daily. And that will be on the board, and in our study groups, and just as always. something to keep our eye on.

[35:01]

And that it's a challenge in a very traditional Zen practice because there's some difference between the secular and the religious realm where we really need to keep a certain amount of hierarchy in the religious realm and the practices that have come back to us as the tradition that we're following does have some inherent hierarchy in it. formation procedures, and so forth. And yet, at the same time, we're trying to be more and more horizontal in our decision-making in the Sangha and the ways that Leila was just talking about. But I think it's good to make it conscious so that we don't assume that we need to be hierarchical in the secular realm when we're talking about work period or something, just because we're used to doing it the way the ancestors did it in the Zendok.

[36:02]

I think, you know, balance and middle way, the razor's edge, this is what we must be alert to and aware of and keep on the path of either one extreme or the other in anything that we do. I know that there are so many things that have passed down to us through the tradition. I was in San Diego, Japan, and I thought it was a really, really grand chapel, and they organized it, and all the work, they really made it happen.

[37:23]

Yes, Rita Gross tells an amusing story that she recently had been discussing these ideas with a Japanese-American Buddhist congregation. men in the audience got very fired up and they told her during a break in the proceedings that they had decided amongst themselves that every other year the president of the congregation was going to be a woman. They were going to make that a rule. And she said, oh that sounds just wonderful. Meanwhile they were in fact eating or had just eaten their wonderful dinner. And Rita Gross said, after she praised the men for this wonderful decision, but in order that they don't end up being absolutely overwhelmed with work, by the same token, you gentlemen should take on some of the kitchen duties. And she said immediately the faces of the men just fell.

[38:47]

And she realized what we're all aware of, that women are willing to go out and earn money and take on careers, et cetera, et cetera. And men so far have been rather less willing to pick up some of the, what have been for ages, the work of women. So we have a ways to go. One more, John? I just wanted to observe that the same thing that Paul was talking about in Japan, He was patriarchal. I don't know much about the history of that. Well, since everything sounds so terrific and going so well here, I was just wondering about demoting Shakyamuni Buddha and putting a female figure on top.

[40:45]

Okay, we'll bring that up. Let the practice commence. One more, Barbara. Thank you, darling. It just kind of sparked in my mind, what if it's really not about visibility? What if it's about invisibility and the pageantry and all the hierarchy and everything? Well, they just play that. You know, the real of life is really managed invisibly, you know, and so what? Well, that's what we've been saying now for generations. Thank you.

[41:20]

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