This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. I'm really happy to introduce today's speaker. Next to me is Lawrence Kaplow, and next to her is Susan Voon. And they are here with us today because they just published a book that they edited together called The Hidden Lamp, Stories from 25 Centuries of Awakened Women. So this is a column collection that they created with or gathered together with 100 koans. And then they asked 100 women contemporary Dharma teachers to write commentaries in the koans.

[01:07]

So that's all included in this book. And many of those teachers are resident here in our community, but they also represent a lot of different Buddhist traditions in their communities. So Florence and Susan Goethe studied with our former poet, Norman Fisher. So they are dominant teachers and very skillful of experience. There's a lot more I can say about them, but I'm not going to speak for themselves. Thank you. Thank you, Rosalie. First off, Florence and I want to acknowledge that this is a time of grief in our community for the passing of Myogen Steve Stuckey, and we want to honor him and celebrate him and express our gratitude for everything he's given to our community.

[02:08]

So we share with you the feelings about his importance and his great gifts to us. And we hope that the stories we're going to share with you this morning will perhaps lift your hearts. And Florence and I have decided to explore in some depth two of the particular stories in the book. So that's what we'll be doing today. Rionin Scars Her Face. Japan, 17th century. As a young woman, Rionin Genso was an attendant to the Empress and was known for her beauty and intelligence. When the Empress died, she felt the impermanence of life and she decided to become a nun.

[03:18]

Rionin traveled to the city of Edo in search of a Zen teacher. The first teacher refused her because of her beauty. Then she asked Master Hakodotai, who also refused her. He could see her sincere intention, but he too said that her womanly appearance would cause problems for the monks in the monastery. Afterwards, She saw some women pressing fabric, and she took up a hot iron and held it against her face, scarring herself. Then she wrote this poem on the back of a small mirror. To serve my empress, I burned incense to perfume my exquisite clothes. Now, as a homeless mendicant... I burn my face to enter a Zen temple. The four seasons flow naturally like this.

[04:23]

Who is this now in the midst of these changes? She returned to Hakuo and gave him the poem. Hakuo immediately accepted her as a disciple. She later became abbess of his temple when he died and founded her own temple. Before her death, she wrote the following poem. This is the 66th autumn I have seen. The moon still lights my face. Don't ask me about the meaning of Zen teachings. Just listen to what the pines and cedars say on a windless night. The story of Rionin is shocking and disturbing to a modern sensibility, to any sensibility. And as a person who considers herself a feminist, when I first read this koan, I was completely horrified and thought, how could we celebrate a woman who, and the wisdom of a woman who would be so self-destructive as to burn her own face in order to...

[05:38]

keep men from being distracted by her beauty? And wasn't it really the monk's problem that they found her beauty distracting? And I want to pause here and give thanks to Ehei Dogen, who 400 years before Rionan's time wrote in his fascicle Raihai Tokuzui about how important it was for women to be seen as capable of being enlightened and how he castigated monks who would think that they should reject women because they were the objects of lust. And he writes, followers of the Buddha should not behave this way. If you despise women, believing them to be lustful objects, should not all men likewise be despised? Men likewise may serve as objects of sexual attraction, just as women may be objects.

[06:40]

Dreamlike phantoms and flowers in the sky also may serve as such objects. Sometimes impure acts have been committed because of an image reflected on the water. It is impossible to count the number of causes that might stimulate sexual lust. There are said to be 84,000 objects in the cosmos. Are we not to look at any of these? So he kind of locates the responsibility of the distraction in the viewer. Nonetheless, coming back to Rionin, this happened later, 400 years later. Dogen didn't convince everybody for all time of this point of view. So I wonder, why should Rionin... reinforced this belief of the monks and the abbot himself in the idea that an attractive woman doesn't belong in a monastery. And I think it's because this story is so disturbing that I'm really drawn to it and to exploring it.

[07:45]

And because it has all these really dark echoes and I think of adolescent girls cutting themselves. What is really going on here? So... Who was Rionin? She was in the imperial court in 17th century Japan. She served the empress whom she loved very much. I want to mention that Grace Shearson writes about her at some length in her really groundbreaking book, Zen Women. I remember hearing Grace talk here when her book came out several years ago. We thank her for her. She's one of our ancestors of putting forward women's teachings. So Rionin was, she was married at 16, she had children, but she really wanted to study the Dharma and practice the Dharma, and she left her husband and her children and entered an imperial convent, which was a place where women of high birth were allowed to practice.

[08:51]

But there wasn't a lot of rigorous training there, and there wasn't... teacher there, and she wanted to pursue her practice even more seriously than that. So she set forth on her own to find a monastery where she could train with a master, and that's what we get in this story. So she was obviously a woman of tremendous courage, and her courage was kind of twofold in a way. First of all, there was this really shocking act and this incredibly painful ordeal that she put herself through. And I really think about it and I see her standing among these women, maybe they're washerwomen, by the side of the river and they are now ironing the clothes that they've washed. And I see her picking up this iron out of their hot coals and just suddenly holding the iron right to her flesh.

[09:52]

And maybe there was a... sizzling noise, maybe there was a smell, and the women must have been astonished and shocked and horrified themselves. I wonder, how did she manage with her own hand to put it to her own cheek without dropping it at the first feeling of the heat? And then after she burned herself, did she fall down to the ground in a faint from shock? Did the women help her? Did they clean the wound? Did they give herself? to take care of her until the wound healed a little bit? What happened afterwards, before she went to the monastery? And also Burns are famous for causing really intense pain, and how did she deal with the pain? So there was that. Then there was also the other really radical thing she did was to destroy her feminine beauty, which was

[10:53]

for her at that time, her persona, even her livelihood perhaps in a way, and she just threw that away, put it aside. So that was a more long-term act of courage and sacrifice in a way. But perhaps it was also to destroy her feminine beauty might for her have been also some kind of liberation. And there was, in Japan, there was some history of women scarring themselves to demonstrate their religious commitment. And Eshun, a nun, who we also have some stories about Eshun, or a story about Eshun in the book, she... It's not in the book, this story, but she also burned her face to demonstrate her commitment to the Dharma. And then there are other stories of people... hurting their bodies for both men and women to demonstrate their commitment.

[12:00]

And we have the story of Kike cutting off his arm in order to be allowed to practice with Bodhidharma. But Rionin's act was a gendered act. She had to destroy her beautiful woman's face in order to practice. And... At the same time, for her, I think it must have been beyond gender. She was doing what had to be done in order to demonstrate her commitment. And she wrote a poem, she was quite an accomplished poet, and she wrote a poem about this burning. She wrote, in this living world, the body that I abandoned to the fire would be miserable if I thought of myself as anything else but firewood. Now, I'm actually not sure if that poem is about scarring her face. That poem might be about before her death, thinking of her cremation. I'm not sure, but that just occurred to me.

[13:02]

But it could also be, metaphorically, about the burning of her face. She's burning her body because she knows that her body is this impermanent thing that is like firewood. So, the more I think about it, the more I... I see the depth of what she did and the more I can admire her. And it occurs to me also that she was taking quite a risk when she did this, when she burned her face. I mean, first of all, there was a physical risk. She could have gotten some horrible infection and died of an infection, but she was taking a risk in terms of her own goals. She could have gone back, perhaps she would have gone back to Hakuo and he would have said... wow, now you're going to be even more distracting to the monks with that horrible scar on your face. And in fact, I imagine she probably was quite distracting. The scar must have been a distraction that was hard not to look at for the monks. So what does that mean?

[14:03]

Maybe her beauty or her lack of beauty in some way was no longer the point. She kind of went beyond that in her act. And I wonder if Hakua accepted her as a disciple the second time, not because she was no longer beautiful, because she really might have been distracting still, but rather because he took her seriously and he realized the depth of her commitment to study. And even though he saw her sincerity, we hear in the koan the first time, he might not have really, well, she's just a pretty woman. She's sincere, but she's really just a woman. I don't know. I can't really believe it. So he really did believe that she meant business. And then, thinking even further about this, I can imagine, well, if she had been born a very plain woman or if she had come to him the first time, presented a plain face or a face pitted with acne scars or something, he might still have said, no, you can't come sit here.

[15:12]

we can't join our monastery because you're a woman. We don't know that it was just the beauty itself that was the obstruction. So she really, in her act of scarring herself, she held up a mirror to Hakuwo. And in a way, she might have... I'm sure she didn't say this, but there's something... and it wasn't her attitude, but I think of her saying, look what you made me do. Now are you satisfied? Is this enough for you? She didn't say that, but he might have even said that to himself in a way. Oh my God, look what I made her do. Gee, I didn't really mean her to do that. Or maybe he just said, wow, I don't know. It's so perfect that she wrote her poem on the back of a mirror, because I imagine her going back to Hakuwo and holding up the mirror to read the poem, but the mirror is on his side, so as she's reading him the poem, I imagine him seeing his face reflected in the mirror.

[16:22]

And as she reads, I'll repeat the poem that she read to him. To serve my empress, I burned incense to perfume my exquisite clothes. Now, as a homeless mendicant, I burn my face to enter a Zen temple. The four seasons flow naturally like this. Who is this now in the midst of these changes? So she burns for beauty, for glamour, to perfume her clothes, and then she burns for the opposite, to let go of beauty and glamour. The layers in this koan really make it fascinating to me, and the layers of the relative and absolute... or the act of burning that she did. I want to share with you a little bit from the reflection that Wendy Agyoku Nakao wrote in The Hidden Lamp. She chose this koan to write a commentary on, and she's the abbot of Zen Center of Los Angeles, and she's been up here, has a strong connection with Zen Center, I'm sure some of you know her.

[17:32]

Anyway, she opens her reflection like this, when my Sangha members pay homage to our Buddhist women ancestors during morning offerings, among the names we chant is that of Ryo Nengenso, who sacrificed her beauty. Whenever I hear her name, I feel the hot iron singe the skin in the early dawn. What is this that awakens so powerfully within that it compels you to act as only you can to know the truth of life in your unique circumstances? She's talking to us all, I think. When I was in my mid-twenties, I experienced a profound stirring within. It came unexpectedly while I was attending my first Zen Sashin on a dare that I could not be quiet and sit still for an entire week. Sometime during those days, there arose within me a powerful force seeking to know itself. In a short time, I had left my marriage, career, and home and instinctively followed the call to fulfill this longing that is blood in the veins.

[18:37]

What is it that slumbers and then stirs so powerfully within us that the little me that we so often identify with is rendered helpless and insignificant? What is it that awakens to and then heeds the call to return home? As Rhiannon herself asked, who is this now in the midst of these changes? So I think Rionan's act brings up for all of us the question, what would I do for the Dharma? And speaking for myself, I would not hold the hot iron to my face in order to go to a practice period at Tassajara, but thank goodness I didn't have to. I got to go without doing that, and times have changed a lot. And we're very, very fortunate and grateful for all the people who've helped make those changes happen. But still, we can understand Rionin's act in other ways. And what does it mean to us to commit ourselves to our practice, whether we're men or women?

[19:40]

For me to go to Tassajara, I had to make a lot of arrangements. I had to take a leave of absence from my job, which I loved, and I had to make sure that my almost grown-up children were going to be okay, well, insofar as I was able to, which wasn't far enough, but anyway. It was a big deal. It wasn't physically painful or anything, but it was a big commitment. And there was this feeling of completely giving myself over 100%. And that's, I think, one of the things that we can look for here in this story and in ourselves of how do we give ourselves 100%, totally make this commitment, step off the 100-foot pole. And I had that feeling about going to Tassajara. and it feels good to have that feeling about practicing. I want to read again from Egyoku's reflection. Each of us as women today, and I want to say also I think this does apply to men, each of us as women today has sacrificed in order to pursue the call of this grave matter.

[20:51]

What have you as a woman given up in order to practice? Perhaps you gave up having a child or a special relationship or time with your partner and children or becoming financially secure in your old age. Perhaps your so-called sacrifice is not seen as sacrifice at all or is at least mitigated by the wisdom that the four seasons flow naturally like this. Egyoku uses the word sacrifice. What is a sacrifice? I have a kind of negative association with the word sacrifice. I kind of associate it with martyrdom and overly self-sacrificing. But actually, it comes from the Latin, and it means, sacer means sacred, and the last part of the word comes from facere, which means to make. So it means to make sacred. A sacrifice is a making sacred. So Rionin made something sacred. She made herself sacred, her faith, her intention, the abbot himself.

[21:55]

All these became sacred in what she did. And a sacrifice is also an offering in religious terms. It's the sacrifice of a lamb to God. It's an offering, a gift to the gods, a gift to the spiritual path. It's a giving up and a letting go of oneself. And I like the word more than the word sacrifice. I like to think of it that way. And how do we make our own lives sacred? And how do we offer ourselves 100%? And we certainly don't have to go to a monastery to do it. I also want to say that. We don't have to go to extremes. But in some way, in every moment of our lives, we have the opportunity to offer ourselves up 100%. So what is it that we can offer up What is it that each one of us can offer, and how can we let go of self-clinging in order to make this offering? So I think I just want to end by reading again Rionin's death poem from the end of the koan story.

[23:05]

This is the 66th autumn I have seen. The moon still lights my face. Don't ask me about the meaning of Zen teachings. Just listen to what the pines and cedars say on a windless night. Back of the mirror, nothing to be seen. Incense smoke rises, an offering of bones and flesh. Everything I have for this one wild and chosen path. Walking the shadowed valleys down to the sea, don't pity me. I've shed my clothes and my feet touch the dust of the earth with an infinite unwavering tenderness. move on to another story.

[24:16]

Satsujo sits on the Lotus Sutra. A devout layman took his young daughter Satsujo with him whenever he visited Master Hakuen Ekaku. Though only a child, Satsujo was devoted to practicing the Dharma. When she was 16, her parents were concerned that she would not find a husband and asked her to pray to Kanon, the Bodhisattva of Compassion. She did this day and night during all of her activities. Before long, she experienced an awakening. One day, her father peeked into her room and saw her sitting on a copy of the Lotus Sutra. What are you doing sitting on this precious scripture, he shouted. How is this wonderful sutra different from my ass, she replied. Quite a punchline, isn't it? So, I hope this koan made you smile, or at least gasp.

[25:22]

I know it makes me smile every time I read it or think of it. In this koan, we first meet that terrible little woman, Satsujo, as her friend and teacher Hakuen lovingly called her. first shining forth in all her outrageous freedom. I love Satsujo. She is the only woman in our book for whom we have stories from her youth to her old age. And each one is a sparkling gem, a glimpse of a real woman who could play ball with the best Zen masters of her age. And I just want to mention before I go on here, there's a little segue to this story where her parents take her to Hakuin, where she would be taken as a child, to kind of straighten her out.

[26:24]

And he instead says, yep, she's awakened. Behind the story of Satsujo is a remarkable and lifelong practice relationship between two very powerful Dharma practitioners, one male, one female, one a monk, and the other a laywoman. That's one of the reasons I wanted to bring this koan forward today. I wanted to honor another man who beautifully supported women on the path of the Dharma. our dear friend, Myogen, Steve Stuckey, who before he crossed into the mystery, transmitted the Dharma to two women Dharma heirs, and who was unfailing in his respect for the depths of practice of the women he practiced with and who practiced beside him. I experienced this respect myself the few times that I met with Steve in Dokusan,

[27:26]

And his words helped me to trust my own heart of practice. So I know some of you probably know a lot about Satsujo's teacher, Hakuen, and some less so. So I just want to tell you a little bit about Hakuen. It'll help you understand their relationship. So he was born in 1686 in the small Japanese village of Hara, Hakuin is one of the most powerful figures in Japanese Zen. He had a tremendous drive to practice, and through his own determination to awaken... Uh-oh. I forget for gesturing. Let's see. How does this go? Okay. Do I have that right? That's right. Okay, good. Through his own determination to awaken, he... really single-handedly revived the Rinzai school of Zen, which had been in decline for 300 years.

[28:29]

This ferocious commitment to his own waking up and to helping others wake up, but he was also funny, very creative, he was an extraordinary painter and calligrapher, and capable of great kindness. Interestingly enough, he taught for most of his life, not in some grand monastery, but in a small somewhat decrepit temple near the village where he grew up. And he had lots of interactions with the villagers. And these villagers were, many of them, his relatives and friends. And although it seems that he was really quite brutal with the monks in his monastery, with the people in the village, he really met them on their own ground with respect and compassion. And particularly... And really notably in the history of Zen, we have many stories of his encounters with lay women, young and old. And if some of you were here last night, you might have heard the story of Ohashi awakens in a brothel that Judith Randall gave a reflection on.

[29:41]

And this is another encounter of Hakuin with a lay woman. In that case, a woman who was working as a courtesan. But Satsujo seems to have been the greatest and fiercest of all his women disciples. And she was also his niece. So maybe Zen power just ran in that family naturally. So as I mentioned before, there are many stories about Satsujo, but this is the earliest of her. She is 16. And apparently there was something about her that made her parents worry that she wasn't quite marriage material. So she begins to pray to Kanon. As I sit with Satsujo's story, this praying to Kanon seems like an essential part of it. Kanon, of course, is Kuan Yin, the bodhisattva of compassion. And I know of no other Zen story where awakening occurs through prayer to Kanon.

[30:48]

And notice that Satsujo was praying for a husband. supposedly, of course, we don't know what she might have been really praying for, and got something entirely different than a husband. That's pretty interesting. Kanon is the one who hears the cries of the world. Sometimes Avalokiteshvara, whose Kanon and Avalokiteshvara are related, is shown with his hand cupped to his ear. And perhaps she heard the real cry inside Saturjo's heart. The one underneath the prayer for a husband or for beauty or for beneath the facade of a conventional girl of her time. The cry for awakening and freedom that lurks somewhere, I believe, in every human being. Maybe you think we don't pray in Zen practice. But abbess Linda Ruth Cutts once told me during a very dark and difficult time in my life when I could barely practice zazen to ask with all my heart for the help of the bodhisattvas.

[32:05]

I remember being in my little student room in Cloud Hall at the top of the stairs and bowing over and over again to my tiny statue of Kuan Yin as it sat on the dresser. of my room, tears running down my face, asking for help, helplessly, until really all there was was the asking. I no longer even quite remembered what I was asking for. My whole heart and being was the asking and the thorough, beat-up, nothing-left feeling of that cry for help. Forgive me if I say that I think the world does respond to that kind of cry, though we never know how or in what way, just as the world responded to Satojo's heart, cracking her open so that she was never bound again, no matter the circumstances.

[33:09]

So there she was, still a 16-year-old girl, but free, free, free. Do you know Hakuin's Song of Zazen? Once, long before that moment I just described in Cloud Hall, I was a college student living in a shack in the woods in Olympia, Washington, and I can remember precisely reading the liberating words of the Song of Zazen for the first time, sitting near the window in my tiny shack. Here's how it ends. The way is neither two nor three, With form that is no form, going and coming, we are never astray. With thought that is no thought, singing and dancing are the voice of the law. Boundless and free is the sky of samadhi, bright the full moon of wisdom.

[34:12]

Truly, is anything missing now? Nirvana is right here, before our eyes. This very place is the lotus land. This very body, the Buddha. So here is Satojo, shining with light while still living in her parents' house, being a daughter, like the story of after the enlightenment, the laundry. You have to understand, to fully appreciate this story, that in most of Buddhist Asia, the Lotus Sutra is the most revered of sutras. And physical copies of the sutra are treated with great respect, just as we attempt to treat our sutra books with great respect. So to put your butt on the Lotus Sutra is outrageously disrespectful.

[35:14]

Perhaps... would have even been seen as spiritually dangerous. One can certainly understand her father's horror when he walked in the room and saw her there. And I'm afraid we must admit at this point, given what she says to her father, that Satsoujo's dutiful daughter persona seems to have crumbled into dust, never to be seen again in her long life. is this wonderful sutra any different from my ass? And she could probably have followed that up with a quote from her uncle Hakuin's song for her devout father. This very place is the lotus land, this very body the Buddha. So this is where we start to get a sense of what at least one person's freedom might look like, might sound like. All day long, we are constricted by our ideas about things, about what is holy and what is profane, what is proper and what is improper, what is female and what is male.

[36:31]

Most of these ideas are not even conscious. They're culturally conditioned, and they shape us and drag us around without our even knowing it. But Zen practice offers the possibility of a radical freedom, of a genuine response to the world, rooted in clear seeing, authentic compassion, and an open heart. Not abandoning those cultural conditionings, but seeing right through them, as Satsujo did. I know that when I hear this story of Satsujo, every time something in my own heart opens and soars in response to her. Yes, she's a disrespectful, uppity teenager, and we recognize that, but she's also standing strong in the truth, unafraid as any ancient Zen master to knock over a thousand years or more of reverence, unafraid of her own father, unafraid of how she might be seen or punished.

[37:44]

The story goes on to say that her parents were utterly bewildered by her, so they took her to Hakuin. You can almost hear them muttering, maybe he can straighten her out. But instead, he recognizes her awakening, and they begin a lifelong friendship and connection with many other equally free-spirited, humorous, and vital moments together. If you buy the book, you can read more of them. Not surprisingly, after her big awakening, Satsujo was disinclined to marry. She just wanted to sit all the time. But Hakuen convinced her that her practice was to live in the world awake. So she did marry. And she had children and eventually grandchildren. But she never stopped practicing. And she never... stopped expressing the Dharma wholeheartedly and calling forth the Dharma in her encounters with her old Hakuin and anyone else who crossed her path. By the way, as an aside, I think this is also a beautiful story about raising children in the Dharma.

[38:56]

If you noticed how it begins, her father takes her to the monastery and she plays in the monastery. And in American Zen, we're always trying to figure out how to include children in our practice. So I have the image of little Satsujo running around that dilapidated temple, learning firsthand that Zen was for her too, as much as any monk. And I hope and expect that she took her children and her grandchildren to the temple too. I think Satsujo has a lot to show us and teach us about what it means to live a life fully in the world and fully committed to the Dharma. Sue showed us a woman willing to do anything to enter a monastery and practice. Here we have a woman who was free everywhere she went. My hope for all of you, for all of us, is that we too live into such a freedom, our own freedom, however it might look, whether in the monastery or outside of it.

[40:07]

Dear child, you must wed, her parents said. I'll marry the Lotus Sutra, the teenager replied. Her mom said, you should give us grandkids. You can't bear children with the Lotus Sutra. Satsujo scrawled a sign and tacked it to her bedroom door. Grownups, keep out. She shut herself up in her room. She sat and sat. She didn't come out for dinner. Go see what she's doing in there, her mom told her dad. Her dad peeked in. He saw her butt upon the book. Oh no, oh no, have you no respect? This is my spot, the girl said. These pages with the marks of ink upon them unfold from my body, and my body blooms out of this lotus. We're tattooed together, Dad. It's all good. Bear me up, Lotus Sutra, my flying carpet. Everything is sacred. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[41:35]

May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[41:37]

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