There's a lot to say about it. It's a very interesting meeting. We had a good discussion the other night. A friend came and she kept in mind what our purpose is. So this morning, perhaps, she's going Well, first of all, I'd like to thank everybody for encouraging me to go and contributing money so that I could go. And it was really, without your encouragement, I wouldn't have gone. And it was really a wonderful experience for me and very much for me the right thing at the right time. It was an incredible meeting.

[01:20]

Everybody there was very moved by it. I think even the people who set it up were surprised by the tremendous response. And there was a strong feeling that although there were 50 of us there, there were really more than 50 of us there, that many people who hadn't come were really there in spirit. It went on for one and a half, almost five days, and it was kind of like a talking machine in a lot of ways. It went on and on and on, and the days were very full, but unlike a machine, it was silent. But we had the same kind of feeling about it, and it went through some of the same sorts of stages. On the third day, everybody had a headache, and everybody was grumpy, and everything was a big deal, and the place began to sort of mellow it out. The general format of the conference was that every day in the morning there was an event for an hour.

[02:30]

And then the mornings were taken up with something they called arts workshops, which were really an opportunity for people in the Naropa community. They were all local people who did the arts workshops, students at the Trump House. to share their practice and their art with us in a real simple and basic way. There was one on calligraphy, there was one on tai chi, one on chanting, one on writing, haiku and journal writing. And each day it was a different thing. And each of the women who did the workshops chose a way of sharing something that was for her, you know, whole work, life's work, art form, but in a very simple and basic way that was very directly related to Zazen and that without simplifying it to the point where it didn't mean anything at all, enabled us to sort of participate in that art form.

[03:47]

For me, the writing workshop and the chanting workshop were the most special. In the writing workshop we did some zazen for a while and then started writing about our body from the feet up and then our breath and then our mind and then at some point something would seem important and you could just write about that. And then afterwards, we wrote haiku, sort of summarizing the prose that we had written. And many people observed that if you really sat and kept to what was essential, that anybody could be a poet. And it was a very, very freeing feeling for people. And the chanting was very special because it gave us all sort of a glimpse into what might have been the origins of the chanting practice that we do.

[05:05]

This woman, who I think was a singing teacher or something, had us do exercises in breathing and in matching pitch, essentially. And it was quite tedious at first, She'd give us a note and a syllable and we were just, we went, ma, ma, and she taught us to project. Then had us pair up to match pitch with a partner. And this went on, it seemed endlessly really. And just at the point where most of us were about to give up and go to lunch or something, the whole room came into harmony. It was a very moving experience. And after that, we chanted some old Christian chants and an old Buddhist chant from Korea, which was very pretty. And nobody wanted to leave. We just chanted and chanted. I think it was almost everybody's favorite thing.

[06:10]

After the arts workshops in the morning we would go to lunch and then the rest of the day was talks and discussions and more talks and more discussions and usually the discussions went on late into the night often back at the dorm in the bathroom like when you were a freshman in college and couldn't get to bed because people would stop you in the hall. I'll try to, we also had an evening sitting period before dinner. And it was very good that we had the sitting and the arts workshops because I felt that kept us sort of grounded in practice. The arts workshops were very simple and they weren't intellectual at all. They were all doing things. In the calligraphy workshop, we just worked mostly with water, brushes and water, no ink. And you can imagine Chinese or Japanese and students hundreds of years ago just doing that. had a strong feeling that at one time, when Zen was big in the Orient, they must have just, you know, had people doing Zazen all day long, in one form or another, with the calligraphy and the Tai Chi, and it was all just breathing.

[07:32]

All really. Zazen. Summarizing the talks is a little harder. So I'm going to summarize a couple, but were particularly meaningful to me and I'll try and tell you as much as I can about what we discussed. The first talk, the first night was by Judith Simmer who organized the conference and she's a Sutra scholar and is the director of I guess the head of the Buddhist Studies Department at Naropa, which is a sort of a Buddhist university. And the title of her talk was Sex Identification in Shunyata, which sounded very abstract to me, and I was sure I wouldn't understand a word of it. But it was a pretty basic talk.

[08:37]

And what she had done was she went through a lot of sutras. She pulled out examples of women as they were portrayed in the sutras and she took a sort of standard example and she gave more variations than I will but basically there would be some woman who would come up to Shariputra or one of Buddha's advanced disciples and challenge him in some way. and he would be taken aback and say something and she would say something and he would say, well, if you're so smart, how come you're not a man? Or if you're so far along the path, why don't you turn yourself into a man so that you can attain enlightenment? Because it was thought in those days that you had to have been born a man in order to become enlightened.

[09:38]

And in some In some cases, the woman would say something like, well, when you get to be as advanced as I am, it doesn't matter. Or from the point of view of emptiness, what is it? Or for years I've looked for my womanness and I can't find it anywhere. And sometimes she would then turn into a man or not, depending. But the main point was that fundamentally, the form is empty, male or female. From the standpoint of emptiness, it doesn't matter. And that we have to, at some point, be able to give up

[10:41]

our preconceptions and our ideas about what it means to be a man or a woman, young or old or whatever, to experience what's fundamental about practice. And the talk that Judith gave was really a challenge to us to try to directly experience our own reality, not through some sort of a filter of our ideas and our preconceptions. And that enlightenment has no sexuality or size or shape. And I was really quite startled by this talk because it was the first talk and I didn't think we'd get down to basics that fast. Actually all the talks were very most of the talks, were very much pointing us in the direction of practice.

[11:50]

The next day, Deborah gave her talk about the woman in the hut, which a lot of people heard when she came here just the other day. And, again, it was a question of, you know, enlightened women who were challenging the monks or whoever was practicing. And these women were maybe outside the mainstream of the tradition. They weren't in the monastery, but they clearly had a lot of understanding. And they also seemed to have had some influence. There was a lot of talk in the discussions about what it meant to be in the mainstream and what it meant to be more like a woman in the hut. The only nun, the only ordained person at the conference, was a woman named Anila Pema Chodron.

[12:56]

It was quite a remarkable woman, who I hope you'll get a chance to meet. She was ordained in the Chinese tradition. She wears dark red, Tibetan-style robes, and she's a student of Rinpoche's, but she's ordained in a different tradition because the full ordination for nuns in the Tibetan tradition died out in the 9th century and anyway she was ordained and then in a limited way and then some I forget just who it was Karmapa or some big Lama suggested that she go find out what the the full tradition was and if it was dead he was pretty sure it was being practiced somewhere and she ought to find it and get ordained in it or it died out again. So she did some detective work and found a place in Hong Kong where they were ordaining nuns in this original Chinese tradition and she went there not knowing any Chinese and took this ordination

[14:12]

365 vows or something, went on for weeks and was considered newfangled because it didn't go on for months. And now it's sort of trying to figure out what it means. And she was saying that she actually would like to be just like the woman in the hut, just sitting at the roadside watching people go by and talking with them. And that was interesting because You know, she'd gone to all this trouble to become formally part of some official lineage. And she talked a lot about, as did Deborah, about what it meant to establish a wholesome and viable Buddhist practice in the West that would be suitable for all of us. and she talked about how we were planting the seed of Buddhism in the West and we weren't too sure what the flower would look like and that we had to handle our actions in a way that would cultivate a healthy flower.

[15:34]

And she talked a lot about how we had to be willing to go on even when we had bad experiences or been insulted and how important it was not to have some kind of solid or rigid sense of our own identity. We've been talking that day earlier about hierarchy and she thought it might be useful to look at hierarchy instead of this way as a mandala. a mandala was another hierarchical sort of way of looking at things but it goes in a circle and that a mandala has to have a circle and a fringe and that what's important is what's in the center and she talked a lot about what do you put in the center of your mandala and if you put your career or your marriage or

[16:42]

money or depending on what you put in the center of the mandala, almost anything you put in the center of the mandala can cause you to recreate yourself and to create just karmic waves out to the edges. And essentially she was saying we have to put in the center of your mandala is practice. And if practice is in the center of your mandala, the rest of the mandala will be beautiful. We went on then to two sort of journeys into Theravada Buddhism. One was in the past and one was in the present.

[17:45]

Susan Murcott from Hawaii, who with Deborah Hopkinson is the editor of the Journal of Women and Men presented a paper actually it's pieces of a book that she's writing on enlightenment poems of women who were contemporaries of Buddha and it's called the Terigata and Terigata means poem or song it's like the chant that we do after we sit as a gata And Terry means women grown old with knowledge. So these were poems of women grown old with knowledge. And they were from the Polycanon. And what she did was very effective. She had all these stories of these women and the biographies were mostly

[18:54]

mostly told how these women came to practice. And it was a little bit like what we did in the first women's group meeting. Everybody told their story. And so she had different people read the stories of these women and then read their poems. So it was as if we were all those women. And they were incredible stories. You know, this woman was on her way to her parents' home to have her baby and she gets stuck. She and her husband and their other baby get stuck in a rainstorm and her husband goes off to look for help and he gets bitten by a snake and she finds his body. She has the baby alone and finds his body in the morning. She goes on to her parents' home and on the way she has to cross a river. And she doesn't have enough strength to carry both babies across the river.

[19:58]

So she puts the older one down and crosses. And she looks back and she sees a hawk hovering over her toddler and she screams. And the toddler thinks that she's calling him. So he comes to follow and he's drowned. And by this time she's going, she's, you know, she becomes crazy and she reaches her hometown and asks about her parents and the man she meets says, ask me anything else. Don't ask me about them. And it seems that her parents' house has burned down and all her parents and all her family has been burned up. And at this point she goes completely insane. At some point she meets the Buddha and Buddha says something which completely turns her around. and enables her to accept her suffering and she becomes his disciple. There were a whole group of women like this and Prajapati was the founder of their order and apparently they went to Buddha and asked permission to start an order of nuns and three times Buddha refused

[21:19]

Finally, the fourth time, Prajapati shaved her head and walked 250 miles to ask the Buddha a fourth time, could she start an order of nuns? And Buddha refused three more times. Finally, Ananda asked Buddha if women could attain enlightenment. And Buddha said, sure, of course. And so Ananda said, well, then they ought to let him start an order of nuns or something like that. Anyway, he apparently talked him into it. But Buddha said it would be okay but they had to have some special rules and he set up these special, eight special rules for nuns and apparently a rather strict hierarchy in which a nun of who had been ordained for a hundred years was to bow to a monk who had been ordained only a day.

[22:26]

The implication being that, you know, you could never overcome being a woman. So one question that was raised was, you know, why did Prajapati accept these conditions? And why did Buddha impose them if he thought women could be enlightened? Um, my main feeling after hearing all these stories and all these poems was, um, I wasn't too concerned about why they'd had all those rules. Um, it, but, um, I was very struck by the, um, the sincerity. of the poems and of these women who had been through these incredible things. And I really, I think we all ended up feeling that these were, somehow this was the beginning of our lineage.

[23:35]

That we were all, this was about the fourth day, and we were all feeling like we were sort of one sangha. And that this was the beginning of our sangha. To make it sort of real, this other woman, Tara Doyle, who had gotten a grant from somewhere to study Buddhist women in Southeast Asia, gave a wonderful slideshow that showed contemporary women practicing Buddhism in Southeast Asia. Nuns and laywomen, teachers and children. It was quite a remarkable slideshow And many of the women look like they could have been practicing today or a hundred years ago or a thousand years ago in their traditional outfits and primitive conditions.

[24:40]

The women in Southeast Asia have actually a lot of problems and very bad living conditions a lot of obstacles as far as the way their monasteries are set up and whatnot. And this woman has actually done a great deal to help them. She built a retreat hut for women in a place where women weren't allowed to go on retreat. Apparently in Buddha's time it was thought that it wasn't safe for women to go on retreat in the woods the way men did. And so men would go on retreat in the forest, but women were, the nuns were asked to stay in the villages. And that's kind of reflected in their poetry. The women write about village life and everyday life, and the men's poetry is more abstract. That was especially nice because there were a lot of Theravada women.

[25:50]

at the conference. And so it kind of gave us a feeling for the strength of their practice and the beginnings of their tradition. And then later Susan Mercott gave a talk about enlightenment in which she talked about a woman named Flora Courtois who you may have read about a woman who had some spontaneous powerful enlightenment experiences in adolescence and spent about 30 years trying to make sense of them and wondering if she was maybe crazy and met Yasutani Roshi and he confirmed that they were enlightenment experiences and started her sitting and I guess she's still sitting in Los Angeles somewhere and Susan sort of compared her experience to Buddha's experience of spontaneous enlightenment without a teacher and that led to a whole discussion

[27:15]

enlightenment and whether it was important or not and what it meant and sort of specific exchanges of similarities and differences in the various ways that people practiced. And there were people there from Tibetan tradition and Zen tradition and Theravada. There were people there who had been practicing quite a long time people, a few people who just apparently came in off the street as it were and that they were interested in the topic and hadn't ever practiced, not so many of those but a few. In the question and answer periods and in the discussions I think the general topics that we discussed were hierarchy and power.

[28:24]

There were a lot of people from hierarchical places. And whether or not women's and men's understanding of practice was different. We talked about relationships between teachers and students. and a lot about sort of how we could encourage each other. The whole thing was really very encouraging and it seemed particularly encouraging that people felt motivated to practice more, to sit. Often when you go to something where people talk on and on, that's not always what happens. Sometimes you just get sort of all stirred up. It kept coming back to practice and people kept talking about that.

[29:31]

We talked a lot about sort of the validity of continuous questioning. Not questioning so much in the sense of stirring up trouble, just not taking anything for granted and that sort of being one of the, a real fundamental principle in Buddhism of not taking anybody's word for it, finding out for yourself and learning to trust your own experience. One of the things that I guess Rinpoche had said to many of the women students was women need to learn not to worry so much about what other people think. And in one of Suzuki Roshi's lectures he talked about how practice is motivated by wanting to become acceptable in its true sense, find some fundamental acceptableness.

[30:38]

We talked about that. I think in the end, although we felt that there had been tremendous obstacles for women in the history of Buddhism, that the most important obstacles were inside ourselves and that In the end, women might choose to be outside the tradition, if that wasn't such a bad place to be after all. Of course, women should have a choice. Everyone should have a choice. You shouldn't have to be outside the tradition in a hut somewhere. That was not freeing. that the way it had actually worked out, being outside the tradition, was a good way to sort of see what was happening.

[31:44]

After talking to all these people from all these different places, I was really struck by what a wonderful place we have to practice. And I just have to tell you that there isn't any place like it as far as I can tell. We have a place that's big enough that we have some stability and small enough so that everybody can make a difference. Everyone's effort can make a difference and everyone can make a contribution. We're really very lucky to be here. We have a teacher who isn't afraid to let us express ourselves and who was very encouraging to us in a lot of different ways, which is pretty unusual.

[32:49]

So I guess I just want to pass on my encouragement to all of us to just keep struggling to find our way. We didn't come up with any answers to any of these problems, I'm sorry to say. We just came up with more questions. And we'll probably have at least one more conference if we can round up the money. So if there's anything you'd like to ask me, I'd be glad to try and answer your questions. What would you say were the questions, the main questions that you came away with? Well, one question I came away with was what is the best way, what are the best ways for us to share our experience, to encourage each other, and yet not talk about our practice in a way that's

[34:11]

that's not appropriate. There seems to be a fine line between a way of talking about one's own personal experience, which is helpful to other people, and a way of doing it which is kind of too informal or too close to gossip or limits people by being too specific. And I think that's particularly hard in a situation like this where there are a lot of people and stuff. So that was one thing. I mean, by the standards of many traditional Zen teachers, the whole conference was very inappropriate in that way. I felt most of what actually went on at the conference was very appropriate, but it was a question that was always in my mind. Another question that was on a lot of people's minds that we didn't have a chance to talk about was how actually people put together their practice in their everyday lives.

[35:28]

And there was talk about institutions and there was talk about social action and political action. There wasn't so much talk about interpersonal things. And a lot of people seem to have a lot of concern about that. Again, an area where there are more questions than there are answers. How did women respond to the part that you read about women should back down to men's practice for one day? Oh, that was, that really... That really shook a lot of people up. I guess some people knew about that. It was a bit of a shock to see some of those things. And of course you have to remember when Buddha lived and that the monks at that time and still in Southeast Asia are fed by the community.

[36:42]

They didn't work. And that in order to be fed, they had to be acceptable to the community. So... I think it's important to sort of put it in some kind of historical context. On the other hand, it has survived. You know, a lot of those rules and stuff have survived. And... In Southeast Asia, in some places, women are a whole lot better off than they were in Buddhist time. The history is a question of Buddhist enlightenment and that's how Buddha saw things. Yeah, that's a real question of when enlightenment is, if you still keep alive these forms of distinct. Yeah. I think our whole idea of what enlightenment is is challenged by history and by having to really find out for ourselves.

[37:59]

I think we have a lot of ideas about enlightenment that It may not be true, but I agree with you, it's a shock. It's a real shock. Why did he have to be asked so many times? It seems like such a small thing. And if Buddha had such a hard time overcoming his time and place in history, how limited are we? compared to the Buddhist path, which was the caste system, which was forget it. And that didn't take too much trepidation.

[39:04]

In the beginning, as far as I can tell, Buddhism said, no caste. That's right. And that's very, very strong in Indian society. To this day, it hasn't changed. That's right. And actually, there are Buddhists now, still, trying to help people get out of the caste system. So the sex role is strong in the Indian caste system. Yeah. What came out of the discussion about whether men and women have different experiences? Well, Ed was limited by the fact that we weren't even men at the time. And even the poems that Susan talked about, the men's poems from the time of Buddha, she said they were more abstract than the women's poems, but we didn't actually read any of them.

[40:16]

So different people had different feelings, and some people felt that there was no difference. Other people thought there probably was a difference and you couldn't pinpoint it. One thing we did talk about in that regard was what it meant if you had a lot of men teachers and a lot of women students or a lot of men who were high up in a hierarchy. And if men's experience of practice and of enlightenment was different would it be hard for women to get acknowledgement and reinforcement? And there seemed to be some evidence that that was the case, particularly in big places where there were a lot of junior teachers and beginners didn't have much access or any access to the main teacher. The junior teacher's experience might

[41:21]

be more likely to be narrower or more biased by their experiences, and that was apparently felt to be a real problem by people who practiced in that situation. It seems like it's very hard to get out of your body, out of what you grew up in. that if you have a teacher with a big enough vision, it doesn't matter whether that teacher is a man or a woman. But because we are men or women, we practice with our body.

[42:28]

And we have our senses as what we practice with until we get to the point of being beyond them. So in that sense, to each individual in an everyday way, it matters. So we kept going back and forth between in the end it doesn't matter and in the beginning it does matter. In some sense, that's all you can really say, is that it matters. And it doesn't matter. I think we should study this more, continue to study this question. It's interesting for everybody. I'm very encouraged by the women's meetings in that group.

[43:48]

It's long overdue. I think it helps everybody. And I'm very interested to see how the audience will respond. Thank you.

[44:26]

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