Good morning. I am so, the only word I can think of is joyous, to be able to welcome our Dharma sister Grace Shearson, Nyoan Grace Shearson, to give the talk this morning. Grace has been teaching in Central Valley for many, many years, and in November she had her Mountain Seat Ceremony, so she is now Abbott Grace, or Abbott Nyoan. Abbott. Among her many accomplishments and endeavors, she has been doing important work on covering the stories of women ancestors, as well as teaching current women who will soon be ancestors. So I think you're going to hear more about that. Thank you. Lori referred to me as Dharma Sister, but I didn't go into any detail about this as my home temple.

[01:09]

You're not hearing me yet? Is it turned on? It's turned on. OK. Now it is. So this is my home temple. I started sitting somewhere in the late 60s with Suzuki Roshi in the city, but I lived in Berkeley. I was a student at UC Berkeley and discovered that just a few blocks from my home where I was living was the Dwight Way Zendo. So I began sitting with Sojin then. And a little bit like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, you know, a big storm came and lifted my home and took me to Canada for many years during Vietnam. It was that storm, when my husband, Suzuki Roshi, performed our wedding before we left. And after that storm settled a little bit, briefly, we returned.

[02:12]

And I came back to Berkeley for the dinner. And you all had moved from Dwightway to here. And so I began practicing with Sojin again. Coming over here today, I was thinking about really the notion of home. Our practice, in the way we describe it, is about home leaving in a certain way. Even when we take lay ordination, there's some sense of leaving home. And that attachment to that which causes us to engage in behaviors that, no matter how repetitive they are, they never work. That's what home sometimes means. But home is also the base from which we notice ourselves. And in that way, there's a sense of vulnerability and exposure in being home.

[03:16]

So I was thinking about that on my way here. You know, all of you know how you can spend 10 years with your relatives over the weekend when you go home. I was thinking about coming back here and, you know, what would it feel like having been here for a while, mostly because I've been engaged in writing and sort of like being grounded for 10 years by the female ancestors, actually. Every time I wandered away from my writing, I would have an injury, you know, sprain of foot or a hand or something. Okay, okay, I'm going back. Behave. So, coming back here, I was thinking about this sense of returning home. And the other side of home as a way of us noticing ourselves when we practice, that most familiar, that most familiar awareness through which we filter our life. and how it is we come to be aware of just what those filters are.

[04:21]

So, this is really what brought me to study female ancestors. There was, for me, an urgency about intimacy with this practice, partly because I was teaching, and that's a big responsibility. So I've been very privileged to be able to travel in Japan and also in Korea to feel what it is for women to practice. Some of you may not know that we're the only Buddhists in the world, really, who practice men and women together. Everywhere else, men and women are segregated. So there's a definite flavor of women's practice, and then there's flavor of the men's practice, which in Japan has taken on some of the flavor of samurai. So, especially after ordination, I became interested in, well, just what did it mean for me to be a priest as a woman and as a mother and now as a grandmother and a wife?

[05:33]

And I became also aware that it wasn't going to do me much good to try to imitate my male teacher. You know, imitation will only get us so far in our intimacy with this practice. There's a point in which we need to become so familiar with it that actually we are doing the practice. This home of ours is engaging in this practice. And I think that many people come to practice with the idea that we will get away from hope. We've been trying to do that for a long time, actually. At the same time, we're trying to get away from some of these discomforts and constraints. We're also trying to return to some perfect state of being loved. I've taken to calling this postpartum depression. In that, if everything went well when we were in the womb, all of our needs were met perfectly.

[06:38]

And ever since then, it's been downhill. So we have this feeling of wanting to connect in a very deep way with something that we've lost. And as you can hear, I will be describing things in decidedly female language, and we have some intimacy with that. Recently, some of the studies show, with mirror neurons, how we actually, when we see someone engaging in an activity, actually our body goes through those motions internally. So, seeing a woman going through the motions is different for women than seeing a man go through the motions. I think that when I was first ordained, I became aware of the Buddhist non-rengetsu. And there was a way that I felt a kinship that I had never felt before.

[07:45]

And I didn't even know there were women practicing. I mean, we had some glimmer, but we kind of felt like, oh, well, we're the first in the West to be doing And, you know, in one of these little Zen calendars, I guess it would have been in the 98 timeframe, there was a poem of Rangetsu's there. And it was about the same time that I was being ordained that I saw this poem clad in black robes. I should have no attractions to the shapes and scents of this world. But how can I keep my vows gazing at today's crimson maple leaves? And there was a sense to me of not conquest of senses, but surrender to one's ongoing mishigas, one's ongoing aggravation, one's ongoing repetitive longing, and the exposure to that.

[08:48]

the vulnerability, the exposure, the repeated failures, the acceptance, all as one thought. So I became interested at that time in knowing more about Rangetsu. As I pursued this, I made contact with a woman by the name of Patricia Pfister, who had been studying these things, the work of Buddhist nuns, particularly the art of Buddhist nuns in Japan, and was living there. And so I had a chance to meet with Patricia and also to obtain her book and to open up this world for myself that felt like a kind of home to me. So that's basically how it opened up for me. But as I continued to investigate, I found to my surprise that mostly men weren't interested in this world. And so I had to work on my own expectations.

[09:56]

It's like, well, wait a minute. You've been studying the words of 100 to 200 Zen masters. Now there are equally 100 to 200 female Zen masters. You're not interested. They weren't very interested. And I, of course, took it personally and got all worked up about it. knowing my own tendencies, I could see my attachments to words and ideas of this world in autumn and the rest of the seasons. So I was able to see something about that, which is, for men, this practice is already perfect in a certain way. It speaks to them most intimately. Most intimately, the words of men, the deeds of men, the pictures of men, the male conquest language, the ways that men need to work on ego tendencies.

[10:59]

It was there for them, but it was not there for me, nor, as I discovered, was it there for many other women who found a layer between them and their home base of trying to fit in to something that didn't quite fit. It's very interesting, quite literally, you buy a kuromo in Japan, the robe, it doesn't fit because you have breasts. And also you have to know when you order it, if you're a classic shaped woman, that means you have hips and butt. You have to add about 10 pounds and a couple inches to the to the dimensions that you give because the measurements are for men. So you give them your measurements and they make it to fit a male body. So there are lots of things about this practice, literally, that just don't fit. And so this is why, for me, it has been very rich to study the female ancestors.

[12:02]

Not because I think that there's some superiority in any way to being a woman. Lord knows why we made this choice. I can't figure it out, really. And I do believe we made the choice. I mean, this was something Suzuki Roshi taught, you know, that you actually choose your parents. This is another good question, some of you. But it puts the responsibility back right to you and your own home base, you know. You made this choice now. Now, what will you do with it? Not that anything about being a female has any superiority to being a male, but that it's different. It's different all over the planet. We could go into why cultures adapt in this way, but frankly, if we look at it, it's just different. And so that difference is something that we encounter. There's been some work recently done by Luanne Brizendine

[13:06]

who's written a book called The Female Brain. And she says, three months in utero, when within the male fetus testosterone kicks in, it slows down the growth of the communication centers. And Jerry Seinfeld also talks about this. When a woman asks a man, what are you thinking, and he says nothing, that's actually what's going on. But there's fewer words. And it turns on the centers for both sexuality and aggression. Aggression sounds like a very loaded word. I would say also on the other side of that, the positive side of that is maybe decisiveness and initiative. So that those areas grow much more rapidly. And furthermore, in her studies, she shows that female babies in particular do something called eye gazing, which is they want to look at and make contact with other people.

[14:18]

is not so important and not done by male babies. They may learn to do that later as a way of meeting chicks, but it doesn't come within the first month the way it does for baby girls. So this is very interesting to me because not making eye contact is a very important rule of our practice and has a kind of I noticed when I came to practice, actually I liked making eye contact, even though I wasn't supposed to. And one of the reasons I liked making eye contact is because I felt safe. And women, and I remember explicitly being taught, whether in so many words or not, I know explicitly I was taught not to make eye contact with strangers, with men, because it was a come on. And it's your fault, you know, if a man accosts you if you've been coming on and eye contact was away.

[15:20]

So coming to a Zen center where I was really safe with my Dharma brothers was a great pleasure for me to be able to make eye contact and not fear any kind of reaction to that. So there are really basic biological differences and the nuns in particular for many historical reasons, which I won't go into now, but maybe will in my workshop, developed practices specifically for women. One practice which I will mention is doing zazen with a mirror, which was done at Tokeiji. If we think about primary delusions and defenses of men and women, We think about men, competence and conquest and the need to dominate as one of the ways practice was developed for men, for young men to come in and to submit to the order and to be a nobody was very important.

[16:22]

But for women, one of the ways that we seek power is through ingratiation, through winning others over, through being nice and so on, through being attractive. And so this gazing in the mirror, to see through that kind of attachment to physical self, I think was an important piece for women. So today I wanted to talk a little bit about Rengetsu's way of teaching. And for those of you who do not know Rengetsu's history, she was born, I think it was 1793, let's see, and died in the latter part of the 1800s. But she did not have an easy life, and she was born in 1791. She was the illegitimate daughter of a high-ranking samurai in a geisha, and her father arranged for her adoption into a lay priest family in the Pure Land School.

[17:39]

So she was well educated and well cared for even though her home was adopted. She served at the court as many women of her class did to learn the arts and she was well educated. She was married when she was 16 by order of her parents. She had two children who died in infancy in her first marriage. There's some question about whether it was an abusive relationship. Later she married again and maybe had another one or two children. It's not entirely clear. That husband, it was a happy marriage, died as did both of her children. And she returned to live with her adoptive father. And when he died, she had no place to live and no place to go. She wasn't going to be considered. She received ordination by then, but she wouldn't be considered to be the head of the temple as a woman.

[18:44]

So she was left with nothing and no home. And therefore, she moved on. And she had to figure out a way to support herself. Now, since she'd been so well educated, she thought about giving lessons. in Go. And for those of you who know the game of Go, Go is to chess as chess is to checkers. This is a very complex game. But she thought that's not going to work. She was very realistic because I will be teaching men and they won't want to be beaten by their female teacher. So she decided that she would become a potter. And she'd always written poetry. So what she did was with her own hands, gather clay and form it, not using a wheel, but with her own hands, form teapots and teacups, things that people used in their everyday life.

[19:45]

And she would inscribe her poetry on the pottery itself. And I brought some examples, which I'll show in the workshop later. You also have one of her scrolls which I donated so you could see the difference between a female calligrapher and male calligraphy. It's very delicate and very feminine. So in her lifetime she produced about 50,000 pieces of art between the calligraphy, the pottery, and the poetry cards. And you would think by the story of her life, that at any point she could have given up. And it's that resilience, that ability to find her home, even when homeless, and to put down roots there, that has always inspired me about Rengetsu.

[20:48]

Of course, our teaching in Dogen's language is to study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by the 10,000 dharmas. To be enlightened by the 10,000 dharmas is to free one's body and mind and those of others. And then, finally, no trace, no trace of enlightenment remains. And this trace of enlightenment continues forever. But, you know, when we read this, the part I think most of us like best, at least I'm speaking for myself, is to forget the self. To study the self is to forget the self. Can we please get out of this morass of self-doubt, anxiety, anger, pickiness, and irritation that's constantly arising.

[21:56]

And yet, all of these parts in studying the Buddha way is to study the self. It's to really essentially go home to one's core awareness and see how that illuminates one's core issues. And I think that Ren Ketsu expresses various aspects of this studying the self and forgetting the self. And particularly to be enlightened by the 10,000 Dharmas. This is a rich part of her teaching, so I'm going to share some of those poems along that theme with you. One of the themes of her teaching is effort, this kind of persistent, pervasive, and ongoing effort. And so I was particularly heartened by finding this poem of hers about nuns, seeing young nuns on their begging rounds.

[23:02]

First steps on the long path to truth. Please do not dream your lives away. Walk on to the end. Of course, we know the end is endless, but nevertheless, the sense of not getting lost in the daydream of self and issues. but really following the way persistently and all the way through. Another one of her poems on the theme of effort, Ice in the Mountain Well. Yesterday I shattered the ice to draw water. No matter this morning, it's frozen just as solid. Most of you have can recollect that sense of freedom and liberation that you may experience at the end of a sashim, where it's like, phew, clear down a lot of stuff.

[24:03]

And then in the morning, or it might last a couple few days, you're in your car and you're ready to honk your horn and you're all steamed up about something. So that's the itch in the mountain well and you need to really persist with that. And regarding Practicing as an ordained person. Pounding cloth. The night lengthens as I pound and pound my worn nun's robe. The hour grows later and later. Autumn here in Shino Village. Shino is where she gathered her clay. And it's interesting that In Japan at that time, of course, pre-washing machines, the cloth would be pounded. But the pounding itself would not only take the dirt out, but also improve the sheen of the cloth, which was otherwise a little bit coarse.

[25:05]

And I think this is also true for all of us. This remarkable amount of pounding that we inflict on ourselves and each other may also give us a kind of softness and sheen as we continue in our practice. So it's important to remember that. The sense of connectivity in which she kind of removes her presence and is enlightened by the 10,000 Dharma's comes out in many of her poems about nature. Evening plum blossoms, which is good. This is a plum blossom temple. As the night advances, the fragrance of the blossoms perfume both the sleeves of my black robe and the recesses of my heart." So there's a way that she's almost not there, that the 10,000 dharmas come forth, and yet she doesn't neglect that

[26:14]

inner home that's so tender and also so melancholy. I actually have this scroll at home and this is a poem for me about moving not only through the 10,000 dharmas but into how the 10,000 dharmas a trip during cherry blossom season. No place at the inn, but I find consolation sleeping beneath the hazy moon and the cherry blossoms." For those of you who haven't or don't know about cherry blossom season in Japan, it's a very beautiful time, not only visually, but also in that it invokes the whole life cycle and one's relations and place in generations.

[27:18]

You meet people on the train in Japan who are traveling hundreds of miles so they can be beneath the tree that their grandparents and great-grandparents were underneath to watch this cycle of life, this full blossoming and drifting. So she loved this poem and she did the calligraphy for it many times. because she wasn't important enough to merit a place to stay. But she found her place in those 10,000 dharmas and her pleasure there as well. Here to me is a one of her classic poems about her own enlightenment, the sense of no trace of enlightenment remains, and the traceless enlightenment continues forever.

[28:25]

And there's a little sentence previewing it. In autumn I visited a mountain temple. The wild bush clover mingled with the flowering pampas grass along the hedge, and various insects sang in unison. and the moment captivates, perfectly, lucidly aware, not a thought, the moon piercing light, completely joining my view. So there's a sense of this union with the light of the moon which is traditionally in Buddhist language the symbol of enlightenment. One of the other things that you'll see in the scroll, I think,

[29:39]

Jerry sometimes hangs it at New Year. The scroll about the baby bush warbler and how inspiring it is to hear the sound of the baby trying despite its ability to make the sounds that it's supposed to make. It's a mature bird. But what you see in that scroll also is her use of hiragana. which is women's script. Historically, women weren't taught classic Chinese characters, but she was. Nevertheless, when she wrote her poetry, she used hiragana, which is the first alphabet that children learn now in school, and was invented for women to use when they were illiterate. It's much easier to learn, so in Japan you'll see hiragana and kanji together. So you will see this kind of round, flowing script, rather than this bold strokes.

[30:45]

And that's the women's script hiragana, which in Japan is regarded as making the emotions more accessible. When people see hiragana, it somehow is more emotional for them. I think I wanted to leave time for questions. I'm not sure what time we're supposed to end. Oh, great. Yeah, I have some time for questions. an ancestral teacher and a lineage from a teacher.

[31:51]

Is there a relationship there? Yeah, it's a big difference in that it was important for men to create a lineage as a psychologist, as a clinical psychologist, as a psychologist. I think it's Will Manby. that men don't carry their infants but they want to have babies so there's, you know, one generation after another. That's only one theory. There was also the Confucian ancestor worship which very much permeated Zen. So this was a very important honoring the ancestors as part of Confucian practice was very important and became mingled within. It wasn't so particularly during the Buddhist time. So this became very important and I still think it's important that we belong to a family.

[33:03]

People ask me this question a lot. well, what do I think about Dharma transmission in that, you know, women have been excluded from the lineage and so on? What do you think about that? Well, I think that generally the fact that women or men are connected to a lineage has a label of reliability to it in that one has been able to get along with one's family members for long enough to receive transmission. And so there's a little bit of reliability there. A little bit. You know, there have definitely been problems on both sides. But the fact is that the Women's Order did not survive. It never survived into Tibet. There were never nuns, actual bhikkhunis in Tibet. It died out. in Sri Lanka and Thailand, and they're having a hard time, as some of you may know, even reviving the Bhikkhuni Order.

[34:04]

So that women were constantly relying on enlightened men to receive transmission, and did. And then they would go on maybe for a couple of generations, and then it would need to be revived. You know, I'm not sure what the cause of this was, but there were certainly enough Circumstantial hardships, legal constraints for women's travel, ownership, legal rights, and so on. You know, in China, a woman belonged to her father until she was married, and she belonged to her husband, and then she belonged to her son. So there were very few legal rights. And we think that we've only been voting for so long. And by the time we got the vote, we didn't really have anyone to vote for, really. So it's been a tough patch. So in any case, it's gone back and forth. But I think that the question of relationship to teachers who are related and have devoted their lives to the practice is very important.

[35:11]

Is that clear enough? Yes, Catherine. When you look at the way that the practice is developing in the West now, with many women, many more women, actually participating in the evolution of how we practice, what do you see that makes you think, yes, there's some of the flavor of the women that are involved? in shaping this now. So the question is about now that there are so many Western women teachers, what is the flavor that's coming through in the practice? And one of the things that I think is really important in studying the history of the women's practice is that it's very similar to what's happening now. First of all, because of the lack of resources.

[36:15]

Many women practiced outside of monastic practice places, so there weren't convents. Of course, that's what we're doing. We're finding ways to practice at home. Because they had no control over whether they were married or not, they practiced as married women, which is also something that we're doing, both men and women practicing as married. Remember, the Buddha said you were supposed to be celibate in order to do this practice, and very few of Western practitioners are following that. So it's good to see that there was deep awakening among married and sexual women. They almost always, in their own practice places, had a way of serving the community, whether it was taking care of orphans or offering social services to the sick. So we also see that as becoming an intrinsic part of Western Buddhism. And finally, they needed to, they could not rely on either corporate or legal sponsors in the same way that the male temples could, so they had to find ways to earn money.

[37:24]

So they worked and had different ways of working, I mean this is Rengetsu's story, that incorporated their practice and work life. So I think this is also a development that's in the West. That's why I think looking at how they practice offers us many more options for how to practice and examples of practice in the world in a way that looking at strictly this, whether it's true or not, authentic mythological male lineage of one monastic teacher to the next abbot of the temple, male monk, doesn't offer us the same richness and diversity of integrating practice in everyday life. Is there anything else? Yes? Hi. Was she in her time in a temple or did she practice at home? Was she a priest? Did she have disciples in her time?

[38:27]

You know, she didn't have disciples as far as I know. Rengetsu, the question is about how Rengetsu practiced. She had training in Shingon, in Zen, and in Pure Land. In most of the poetry you see the Zen flavor, the wabi-sabi, you know, warm and a little lonely flavor. You don't hear the Pure Land, you know, I'm going to the heaven, you know, in the Pure Land. You don't hear that in her poetry so much. So you hear the Zen flavor in her poems, but she did not She died in a temple. I think she died in a Pure Land temple. But her life was living in the world. And the interesting part of supporting herself through her art, she was extremely successful. Even in her lifetime, financially, she was extremely successful. Everyone wanted a piece of Rengetsu, literally. She taught other artists how to forge her signatures so they could make money, too.

[39:31]

It's very hard to know whether you're getting an authentic rengetsu piece or not. And I think that this is a wonderful model for us as to how she carried her Buddhist practice even into her life as an artist. One of the things I'm interested in is actually gathering up her poems, as I did today, and putting them into what I think is her dharma. Her dharma teaching, because there isn't a collection of her dharma teaching per se, but actually it was all given away so that when you had your tea and you held her cup in your hands and drank her poetry in, you could have this intimate connection to her teaching. Yes? Well, this is a question that probably also arises frequently as you make this presentation, but in one sense it's simply true that women have been labeled, defined, subordinated, excluded, and therefore the work that you're doing is really important, has to be done.

[40:43]

But then, on the other hand, you start using a phrase like, her calligraphy is very delicate and feminine. And things like that, where you start attaching qualities to femininity, then you get into trouble, right? Well, you think I do, anyway. Well, let's investigate. So, there are many women, that I know, including me and you, that I wouldn't immediately describe as delicate, or unaggressive, or, you know, these kinds of things. And it seems like as soon as we've made some progress in liberating women in, say, Euro-America in the last few decades, then the cutting edge becomes the denial of gender, in a way, you know, like that transgender realities and all this.

[41:46]

So how do you negotiate this? Well, I negotiate it with being home. In other words, I don't have any attachment to female characteristics myself. And I've definitely been busted for that. But I do know that there's a flavor when you actually study or go to the female temples, that's a different flavor than what you feel. And when I went with Chitose-san, Hoitsu, Roshi's wife, it was her first time to a woman's temple, and she said, oh, the feeling of balance is so different. There isn't that huge, imposing male gait. And for me, I think that there are characteristics of the feminine and masculine of which we inhabit freely or not.

[42:49]

The important thing for me is to not, the most important thing for me, I'm not so concerned about referring to script and delicate and flowery or even feminine as I am concerned about how it evokes a wound and how we become attached to that wound. You know, I've been hurt in this way and that way as a woman, and therefore it's your fault. So that's more of a concern to me. You know, I had two sons myself, and so I didn't have the pleasure of raising a daughter, but now I have two granddaughters. And recently I, well, a few years ago actually, I was walking with my grandson, and he loved trains from the time You know, he could speak. He loved trains. Neither of my granddaughters particularly were crazy about trains. But in any case, I used to take him on train rides, and as we were walking to the train, I saw flowers. And I said, oh, the flowers, the colors of the flowers are so beautiful. And he shook his head, and he said to me, no brahma.

[43:53]

cars are beautiful. So, for me, there's something that expresses itself in male and female terms, but I don't worry about it too much. And I don't really try to define it as such, but I do think that there's a difference in the calligraphy when you see her scroll and the curvaceousness to it and the more subtlety and delicacy to it than what you see in the stroke which is all important in the Kanji. So if that doesn't translate to you as a Zen, then that's okay with me. But I think it's a good start as long as we don't become attached to that as defining features. I think, are we out of time? Yes, we are. But I'm going to be doing some book signing and also a workshop. So I'm going to be around to talk to you. So I hope to. connect with you and do some eye gazing after this.

[44:54]

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