a conference on feminism and Buddhism. And she bumped into a friend from the Diamond Sangha who was there for a conference on Christianity and Buddhism. And a friend from the Diamond Sangha who was visiting his family, so we have a triad from the Diamond Sangha. I wonder if he's still here. And Susan has been very kind to come and talk with us some about what's been happening at the Diamond Sangha in the realm of women and Buddhism, or feminism and Buddhism. Thank you very much for being here. Why don't you pass this out now? And maybe I'll let you. I've got a handout. And I didn't realize there'd be so many people. So if you could share them, maybe three or four to a copy, I won't be referring to them right away, but I will be getting to it in a while. When I get to that, I'll read it aloud, too,

[01:05]

in case people end up without copies. OK. I'm going to begin by reading a bit of the talk

[02:22]

that I gave at Naropa. I do this partly because I'm shy. And after that, I'm hoping that we can have quite an open discussion. What I want to do is really to help address issues that your Sangha has that have come up for people here. And I thought I'd do that by just introducing some of the areas that we've touched on in integrating feminism and Buddhism in our own Sangha. A few days before leaving Honolulu, I was speaking with a woman who has been working with Kahawai, the journal that I and Michelle and sometimes David and others helped put out. And she's fairly new to the practice in our Sangha. She had been speaking to me about an experience that she had had while sitting in meditation and the conflict that had arisen for her as a woman sympathetic to feminism. She described herself as sitting one day in meditation

[03:25]

and experiencing her body as being like an empty shell. The form of the shell was the form of Shakyamuni Buddha. Her immediate sense was that it didn't matter that the Buddha was a man. Afterwards, it led her to wonder how she could want to advocate women role models. How could she integrate her experience in meditation and her feminism? I felt as though in sharing this with me that she was touching at the heart of something that we're attempting to address in our work and practice in the Diamond Sangha. While recognizing that words don't convey the fact, we say in the Heart Sutra, form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form. We use these words, form and emptiness, as metaphors for our experience of the world. My friend Sarah, who had sat in meditation and as a beginning student, had experienced herself as being the Buddha,

[04:26]

was expressing what we might call the empty world, the world of no form, no categories, no man, no woman. Questions come up for her when she steps away from her meditation seat and carries that into the world that we would call the world of form, of colors, of categories, of distinctions and of thinking. Most of us in this room are people who have experience of meditation and so it isn't hard for us to understand these concepts of form and emptiness. A characteristic of Zen in present practice as well as in history has been dialogue or interaction as a teaching device. And so in speaking of the world of form and emptiness, I would be probably told to wash my mouth out if I spoke this way and instead I would be presenting it. And so I might ask, what is this? And in doing that, I'm asking you to show me the world of no form.

[05:33]

The world in which Sarah sits, my friend back in Honolulu and realizes that she is the Buddha. This isn't something esoteric. It's something that we realized in our practice and that we all understand to some degree, even if only a little bit. There is a koan from the recent issue of Kahawai, a series that Thomas Cleary sent us, the first of three we've now received. The koan is called, A Woman Living in a Hut. In that koan, a monk approaches a woman hermit and asks her, do you have any followers? She said, yes. The monk said, where are they? She said, the mountains, rivers and earth, the plants and trees are all my followers. The monk asked, are you a nun? She said, what do you see me as? The monk said, a lay person. She said, you can't be a monk. The monk said, you shouldn't mix up Buddhism.

[06:37]

She said, I'm not mixing up Buddhism. The monk said, aren't you mixing up Buddhism this way? She said, you're a man, I'm a woman, where has there ever been any mix up? This woman has clearly experienced her own emptiness and the emptiness of all things, so she can quite clearly express the fact, you're a man, I'm a woman. Or the table, the chair, the mountains, the rivers, the cool summer day in San Francisco. There's a kind of idealism among meditators, the belief that meditation has nothing to do with the world of form and that the Buddha Tao can somehow be quarantined so that ideas and isms or emotions or the relationship between the sexes somehow don't touch it. There are variants on this idea. For example, some people feel that emotions are okay, but isms are not okay. But either way, the identifying characteristic of this view

[07:38]

is a desire for separation between practice and life, a desire for sanctuary, a longing to rest in the empty world. And then we say that such a person has died but has not yet come back to life. As Blanche said, I've just come from a four-day symposium that was held at Naropa Institute. And there I was very impressed with the number of the women that I met, women coming not only from Tibetan practice but from Theravadan and Zen practice from Minnesota and Texas and San Francisco as well as Colorado. And what struck me about the women that I met from Naropa itself was that many of them had been very strong feminists in the past but had given up their feminism in coming to practice. And so, for example, we had two of the women that I got to know fairly well who were organizers of the conference.

[08:40]

One, whose name was Judith, was the organizer and director of a rape crisis center here, I think in San Francisco, for three years. This was a number of years ago, 10 years ago. And she initially was working with women who had been raped and did that in counseling for a several-year period and realized eventually that she needed to work with the rapists themselves and so began going into prisons and working with rapists. And what she realized in that experience of working in the prisons with the rapists was that her own aggression toward the rapists was no different, really, than the aggression of the rapists toward the women that they were raping. And so, from that experience, turning to practice, Marilyn was another very impressive woman with a very strong background in feminism who had been active in the early days in New York in the mid and late 60s in the feminist, you know,

[09:41]

the kind of emergence of the feminist movement again. And she was one of the editors of Off Our Backs, one of the first feminist publications. And what she found was that in the rather dogmatic collectivity that grew up at that time where no expertise was allowed, no division of labor was allowed within the collective, that eventually the whole thing self-destructed. And from that experience turned to Buddhism and also, it seemed to me, a rather hierarchical form of Buddhism in Trimpa's situation in Boulder. But what I found was that the women, though the women gave up, these particular women gave up their feminism for personal reasons, that it was also encouraged by the teacher that feminism be given up

[10:42]

and that this conference represented the beginning or like the tip of an iceberg of a kind of reemergence or integration for women in that sangha for bringing together these disparate sides of themselves or two halves of themselves. So that was really wonderful for them. Our own experience in the Diamond Sangha, though, has been very different because women like myself who have come to the practice with a very strong background in feminism have been encouraged, rather than the opposite, in our feminism. We've had about five years of experience in the Diamond Sangha in consciously integrating feminism into the practice. And this effort has reached into many dimensions of the practice. We proceeded on the intuition that Zen and feminism are very much alike. Both begin not with theory, but with experience.

[11:44]

Both speak of liberation and that liberation extends in the best sense and is available and relevant to both men and women. The liberation that is spoken of in both Zen and in feminism means embodying the teaching. It means expression in ordinary everyday life, means in the kitchen, in the bedroom, in the workplace and in our relationships with each other. And finally, both imply a respect and a gratitude for all life. Buddhism teaching us the way to realize our true nature and therefore the nature of all beings. And feminism by helping women to become women and men to become men. As in that koan, you're a man, I'm a woman. Feminism helps us to realize that. What I want to do then is to look at some of the ways that we've tried to integrate feminism and Buddhism in the various aspects of the practice in the Diamond Sangha.

[12:46]

And what I thought I'd do is to show two of the very earliest things or speak about two of the very earliest things that we did and then more or less list a whole lot of other areas that we've touched. And then I hope that people maybe could find from that list or even from your own experience here, what's most current or relevant in your Sangha. And we can talk about those things because I found it Naropa that I could have talked for about four hours. And I want to touch on what's most relevant for people here. So one of the first things and this was about five years ago that we did was we began to look at the sutras that we chanted. It was a natural place for us to begin because it happens that Ekin Roshi and a number of people in our Sangha are very interested in language. We have a couple of poets or a number of poets, a number of writers,

[13:47]

people who are just very interested in language and poetry. And so this, turning to sutras as a place to begin was really the impetus for this came from one or two women. It wasn't a kind of general Sangha movement by any means but just a couple of women who were disturbed by the sexist language in the sutras. So if people have a look at what I've passed out, we do a very, we have very little ritual and we don't do a whole lot of sutras in our Sangha. We do about 15 minutes of chanting a day in morning service and in evening service at the end of Dazen and then two times a week we have a half-hour sutra service. Now in that half-hour service we do ten sutras. That was a collection put together by Ekin Roshi

[14:48]

and of those there's some like the purification, like the four vows that have no gender references at all and so, you know, any kind of changes are not applicable to those. But two that I have here that we've worked a great deal with are Hakuin Zenji, Song of Zazen and Todai Zenji, Bodhisattva's Vow. And I've put at the beginning with Hakuin, we have three versions of that and the one at the beginning is the earliest version and then you'll see a middle version and a most recent version, the version we now have. How are people with, do a lot of people not have these? As much as you can if you could share around. Also, can everybody hear me?

[16:00]

People in the back hear me okay? It's okay? You'll see that in the first version, in the second stanza, we have like a man in the midst of water crying out in thirst, like a child of a wealthy home wandering among the poor. And then down in the fifth stanza, the man who tries it only once will find his guilt swept clean. His evil way is completely gone, the pure land itself, not far. The man who hears the truth but once and listens with a grateful heart, accepting it, praising it, gains blessings without end. But the man who turns within himself and proves his own self-nature, self-nature that is no nature, goes far beyond mere cleverness. He knows effect and cause are one, not two, not three. The path runs straight. With form of formlessness as form, going and coming, he never moves. With thought of thoughtlessness as thought, he hears the law in song and dance.

[17:02]

So, you can see that lots of mans and he's in that. And then we have a kind of intermediate version. I think this is really interesting because we have like a man in the midst of water crying out in thirst. And then down at the fifth stanza, we've made it to the person who tries Zazen but once, sweeps all his ancient vice away. So, you see, we have a problem still. The person who hears this truth and then still more, the one who turns within and proves his own self-nature. He knows effect and cause are one, not two, and so on. His song and dance are the voice of the law. And so, in working with this, and often it's been Akin Roshi working in conjunction with women who are concerned about this. We have a pretty nice version now of this particular sutra. Feeling still that the poetry of the original is very difficult to capture

[18:06]

and I don't think yet that that's been accomplished. But we have, how sad that people ignore the near and search for truth afar. Like someone in the midst of water crying out in thirst, like a child of a wealthy home wandering among the poor. And down again to the fifth stanza, those who tries Zazen even once wipe away beginningless crimes. Where are all the dark paths then? The pure land itself is near. Those who hear this truth even once and listen with a grateful heart. And so on. So, we've really improved that, so that we aren't speaking of only men. And likewise, in Todai Zenji, do you folks do these two sutras at all? Or you're not familiar with them? Yeah. We have in Todai Zenji,

[19:06]

the original version we did was one in which patriarchs and Zen masters appear. This is a kind of, you know, phrases that we found problematic for a long time and have worked that out fairly well now, I think. We have in the old version, this realization made our patriarchs and virtuous Zen masters extend tender care with the heart of worshipping. And then further down, we have the same problem with men and he and him, who can be ungrateful or not respectful even to senseless things, not to speak of men. Even though someone may be a fool, be warm and compassionate to him. If by any chance he should turn against us, become a sworn enemy and abuse and persecute us, we should sincerely bow down with humble language in reverent belief that he is the merciful avatar of Buddha. So in our new version, we now use, instead of patriarchs and Zen masters,

[20:09]

we use either founding teachers or great ancestors. Founding teachers being the one that we've used for the last few years and recently we've been turning to ancestors or great ancestors. This realization made our founding teachers and virtuous Zen leaders extend tender care and so forth. And then, who can be ungrateful or not respectful even to senseless things, not to speak of people. And if by any chance such a person should turn against us, become a sworn enemy and abuse and persecute us, we should sincerely bow down with humble language in reverent belief that he or she is the merciful avatar of Buddha. So, those are two sutras in which we've done a lot of work. And our sutra service is one that I don't think would offend feminists any longer. With this exception, if you turn to the next page,

[21:09]

we have, and I believe you do also, a dedication in which we recite the lineage of our teachers. And this is problematic for some feminists because, of course, there are no women in the lineage. And I myself have not come up with any true solution to this yet. But I've been thinking about it a great deal. And in the research and just the material that we've been collecting, I've begun to find some women that we could appropriately plug into our lineage. Myoshin is one. I've been working for the last two years on a translation of the Theragatha, which is the songs of the sisters, the original nuns in the Buddha Sangha. And some of those women could very easily serve as founding matriarchs.

[22:14]

Another issue, though, to consider is whether that's even something that we want to look into, a kind of comparable lineage of women teachers. You know, in Zen, there are many, you know, Bodhidharma is a semi-legendary person. Zen invented the idea of lineage, though it was not there in Theravadan Buddhism. And I don't know, it's just something to look at. So this is one thing that I haven't got any solutions to at the moment. Besides working with sutra changes, and besides just the sutras, I guess we've done a lot more with language in Koen's study and in Roshi's own presentation. ...has generated these problems, and we haven't even solved them yet.

[23:37]

But they're the same problems that women are struggling with in their culture, in their lives. You know, can women, you know, be corporate executives in the afternoon? Can they really do it all, at once? And it seems that somehow one can come out of the Zen movement, and some people feel, you have to be able to do it all, now. And that we tend to feel terrible if we can't come out of the juggler at all, and be a mother and a wife, and now on top of that, you know, a prostitute and anything. But I think the fact of it is that most of us can't do it all at once. And that if you reach a point in your life, in this particular district, where you want to do a more household thing, and you feel that you have a very strong sense of accomplishment, you start to come out of Zen.

[24:40]

And that's not the main direction of this project. In Berkeley, what we're doing is consciously trying to develop a form of government. In Berkeley, we're much more than what we used to be. We're trying to look to the future, and we're trying to develop a form of governing ourselves, and learning from ourselves, and having the practice go away. That it's somehow true to our heritage of the lineage, of the teaching path now, and that side of the heritage, and yet leaving more space for us to develop

[25:42]

as American men and women, in ways that we don't see as being open with Congress. Did you want to speak? Yeah, a couple things that come to my mind, listening to the discussion. One, which has always been a pretty major question for me, in the time that I've been practicing, is, and it relates to people bringing up the question of what time you like, and how that goes in practice, and how that can be used. I remember when I first became acquainted with Buddhism, and started reading up on it, and found out that, essentially, this tradition was founded by a man whose initial religious act was to renounce his family. And I never thought that was true. My first experience was, as a child, being in a family, which was, in some sense, preserved by my father,

[26:43]

who was a religiously motivated person, he didn't feel that those things were mixed. That there's some kind of abstract truth, and it's impossible for him to just relate to everything that he's learning. I don't know, it's not something I have an answer to, but it's something that I've certainly been practicing here for some time. So, it's turning in my head, as I find, as I've been practicing, fundamentally, in my life, but a good deal of the rest of Buddhism hasn't heard of it. Some of it, almost personally studied, and it relates to something. And another thing, I just realized, as I was listening to the last person talking, and it related to some of the other things I've been hearing people say, most of the people speaking here are women, which is appropriate. But it occurred to me that it was interesting how

[27:44]

these conversations seem to be turning more and more into questions of hierarchy, and position, and power, and status, and things like that. And I realized that I personally don't find a whole lot of interest in these things. I've been practicing here for quite some time, as people learn as they go. I don't have any positions in here at all, and I've never really felt all that interested in them. Which isn't to say that... I mean, it just struck me, I realized that that was so, and it never occurred to me that I wanted to rise in the structure. I don't care if I ever rise in the structure. It just struck me as interesting that that question shouldn't arise in some persistent manner, but rather like it's something that people really do.

[28:47]

Just a minute, thank you. I'm less and less interested in hierarchy, but it's such a big percentage benefit, or at least for me, when I paint, because maybe I'll do that as well, but I feel like it's terrible. And it's just natural, that's the way I feel this day on. I've never talked about hierarchy with all the scholars, so I was trying to be a bit of a businessman. So I'm interested in that, and a lot of people do that. I've had to recently sort of pull back from that, because I wasn't able to do it fully, and I had to start asking myself why. And one thing I've noticed about hierarchy, because we have it, it seems like, we have to address ourselves to that person. We can talk about other things. At least some of us have to address ourselves. It requires a certain momentum,

[29:49]

or it seems to require a certain momentum to keep up the hierarchy, and we're working our way up the hierarchy. And men can easily give themselves to that, because they're thinking about having children on themselves, because men find themselves in that. So there's a certain anxiety with women, and there have been at some point, and I felt it much more than myself. An anxiety of letting go, of getting to that momentum, and then there's a real moment where I stop, and I feel as if I'm going to slide back, and eventually I can see other aspects to that. And you begin to see that maybe there are other priorities, and that's a whole different process, because you start looking at things more deeply. Anyway, I think it's interesting,

[30:54]

that kind of momentum, that it's easier for men to maintain, than it is for women. I think there's a lot of people who are going through that now, and that's leading us to begin to look for other ways of... Let's see if you have... Is what you're going to say relevant to that, or shall we come back to it? Why don't you wait a second? Go ahead. If I'm mistaken, I would like you to clarify what you mean by the feminine issue in the presentation of poems.

[31:55]

Would people like to hear about that right now? Let's finish this and I'll speak to that, OK? You and you. I have recently attended a conference, which included... Mostly it was a very highly Christian group, but very interestingly, it's more on the mystical side, and everybody loves medieval fantasy science literature and such, and one of the things that was involved in the group was a certain feminism, and they constructed, and do run in Berkeley at this time, the idea of presenting in more Christian form, maybe it's more pagan form, actually, since I observed it, but more Christian idea than Buddhist, certainly they don't know what Buddhism is, a mass for the mother.

[33:03]

Now, this is a very feminist idea, but what they did, looking from maybe a more monastic view, or a more religious view, what they did actually was masculinate everything they thought they were bringing out as being feminine. The mother turned into some vision of very masculine abstractions in this particular connection, and their imagination, they thought that they were discussing something feminine, but in fact, they had created a monster. Right after that, there was the masculine point of view, of which the lady who headed this one, her husband put on this next one, and it's a Catholic mass,

[34:05]

excuse me, I'm not very good at Christian saints, St. Serapion, and they had pulled out a text from this, and they did a beautiful feminine mass. It had all the traditional ideas, of course, this is done in costume, you don't get all the things put together quite correctly all the time, but they did their best to put together what would have been the mass of this saint that was supposedly done so many ages ago, and is not done now, and their idea of a mass, these men, was a very religiously feminine example of what they were imagining at that time. They had delicate white cloths draped at the table,

[35:09]

instead of bright colored dupes and such, and you see the difference there, vast distinction, they reversed their roles terribly without knowing it, and I don't know exactly, but this has too much bearing exactly on things that have been said, in a very immediate sense here, but it just came to my mind quite vividly when people were talking about what's done in the outside world, I worked in the outside world for a long time, and what's done in the inside world, our hierarchy and such, it was give and take in everything, believe me. It seems to me that a lot of the men who maybe came to Zen Center when they were young,

[36:11]

so they've been here for a while, sort of plugged right in to the scene that was happening, that was more what they were trained for, so they could more easily plug in, it seems like a lot of them are now pulling back and questioning, I mean it's sort of the same side, the reverse of what's happening with the women, is that they're pulling back and thinking, my God, here I've done this thing for 6 or 8 or 10 years and become a priest, and is this really what I want to do? You know, it seems... Yeah, but I think she's right, I wasn't noticing it was happening with men too, about the same seniority. They're wanting to explore their family life, men who are married or have children are wanting to figure that out, and they don't want to be so plugged in to the sort of track, and I think we also need to work to give them the space, so that they can take that time away,

[37:12]

so that we're not... have some idea of them always being the good third baseman, that they can do a job half-time, or whatever it takes for them to work out that side. It's difficult with a monastic lineage in which the whole structure is based on somebody saying, I'm putting everything aside to do this practice, and I'm not going to have a personal life. And then, now, here we are, a bunch of lay people together, and we're saying, well, we want to try and have a personal life, and we still want to try and somehow use the forms of a monastic life, and, you know, at what point are we bastardizing both forms of being, and at what point are we really integrating them? And I just, you know, it's sort of like taking the Marlboro out of the country or something.

[38:14]

It's really a sorting problem. Where's the Buddhism in your personal life, and where's the... How do you... Are people interested in... There's so many questions. I don't know, do people want to hear about... It would be nice to. We could spend all night on this subject, but I think it might be nice to... I'd like to hear about it. Do people here use... Is Kiyosaku... I understand, this is my demonstration model. Now, is Kiyosaku voluntary here, or is it given... It depends on how long you've been practicing. When you knew it's voluntary. When you knew it's voluntary. We used to, in our Sangha, give it only... Not voluntary. And so it was up to the discretion of the Tantra to give the Kiyosaku. And this is not entirely

[39:16]

the influence of the women in the Sangha. I think it was primarily Roshi's decision, but I think it came in part from the impetus of some women, particularly feeling that they didn't like the Kiyosaku in the dojo at all. There's at least one woman who will not, though she is capable of being Tantra, does not wish to be Tantra because she doesn't like the idea of the stick. Only the Tantra is... The Tantra is the person in our dojo who walks the stick. Is that not true here? Everybody. Everybody walks the stick. Almost everybody. Not everybody. There are lots of people. Voluntary, do you mean receiving it? Receiving it. You see, the Tantra is the person who walks the stick in our dojo. So here, many people walk it. Anybody walks it. Not anybody, but... Older students. Men and women walk the stick. In our dojo, it is kind of the position of authority. And also, the Tantra has often been in a man.

[40:22]

And so this is one of the positions that we felt it was really important to see a woman in that position. But as I say, it's also been questioned by some women, and one woman in particular, though she could be a Tantra, has not chosen to be Tantra. So one of the changes that we now have is that for us, the Kiyosaku is only voluntary, and so I suppose you do the same thing. You ask for it. Is that correct? Sometimes it's given. It's given, right. And in our dojo now, it's never given without being requested. What do you do with people that are sleeping? We let them sleep. We let them sleep. That doesn't always happen. I don't know how appropriate this is, but I... Do you do the ritual that we do of walking the Kiyosaku in the morning to open the dojo, and then walking it to close the dojo?

[41:23]

No. We have, as I said, very few rituals in our sangha. And the major one is that in the morning we walk the Kiyosaku to open the dojo and then close the dojo. This has always been an interesting ritual for me because it seems very phallic. I'll demonstrate. This is the altar. So the first bow is to the Buddha. And then the teacher's seat is in the middle. And the second bow is to the dharma. And then the third bow is to the sangha. And in the morning, the stick is down, and you walk the stick around the perimeter of the room. And this ritual, then, then the stick is up on the return. And that means that the dojo is then open for practice. At the end of the day,

[42:30]

the only ritual that we do is the same ritual, only in reverse. So we go and walk, and then the stick is down, and the dojo is closed for practice. So I haven't a clue what we can do with that ritual. But that is our ritual.

[42:58]

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