Well, I'm really happy to see everyone this morning. I was thinking about the rain on my way over here. You know, the mind is a terrible thing. So I thought, oh, it's gonna rain and no one will come. Then I thought, being cheerful, oh, it's gonna rain, only the most serious of students will come. And then I thought, what a jackass about myself. noticing my thoughts. And today I wanted to talk about circumstances and conditions, and in particular, what is it? What is it that flows through all circumstances and conditions? What is it? You know, this idea that there are good circumstances and conditions is one that we're very attached to as human beings. Basically, we want to be alive and we want to be taken care of and we want to be fit.

[01:06]

And more than anything, I think, I call this postpartum depression. After leaving the womb, if everything went well in the womb, we had everything we needed. And after that, it's all been downhill. So we're constantly seeking this kind of perfect... conditions and circumstances. And, of course, it is unattainable. This is something that the Buddha noticed and pointed out to us. So I'm not trying to talk about the circumstances in particular of being a male or female in the practice, but rather finding yourself in any of these circumstances or others like me. How is it that you find your way? I want to go back a little bit to what brought me to studying this.

[02:11]

I began seeing with Suzuki Roshi when I was about 20, and I heard from some folks in New York who listened to the podcast from San Francisco Zen Center that it was the same talk. decided not to tell that story this time of meeting Suzuki Roshi. But it did change my life in a very sudden way. And he talked to me with that first sitting about suffering. And at 20, I was pretty good at finding ways to avoid it. And I'm sure you can tick off the ways. that a 20-year-old in 1966 could avoid suffering. Or try. Party long enough so that, you know, you're too hungover to feel the suffering the next day, actually. That's probably the method.

[03:14]

It had a profound effect on me. And as I continued my practice life after that, mostly sitting with Sojan over in Berkeley in the early days, and since Suki Roshi would come over. But I wanted to get married, and I wanted to have children. And I thought that this was an important part of my journey, my spiritual journey. And so I did. And when I came back to practice, and I went to Canada, my husband and I went to Canada during the Vietnam era, and came back, a little bit like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. You know, the wind lifted up the house and spun it all around, and we were in Canada for a while, and then ended back up in Berkeley. I don't know how many years later, I would say probably 15. And now it was a different set of circumstances.

[04:18]

And sooner or later, I noticed that... There were no women on the altar. And I know Linda Ruth was doing the same work over here. And we kind of thought we were the first women to be entering this practice in the way we were so fully. But still, I made trips to Japan and I found little tidbits, little images of women. And it occurred to me that in the history of our practice, Even though the Buddha had specified four orders, monk and nun, lay man and lay woman, and said that the practice was incomplete without all four orders, we had never really learned anything from the nuns of Asia. And it never occurred to us, in fact, it didn't occur to me, I should say, that we were practicing the practice that all the male teachers had brought from the male monasteries.

[05:25]

and that this might be a little bit incomplete, and in particular, might not meet the needs in the same way that it did for men, might not meet the needs for women, particularly women who were practicing with families, but just women in general. I'm not sure if you've read Luann Brizendine's book, The Female Brain, But she talks about the difference in the nervous system. And starting about three months in utero, when testosterone kicks in for male babies, the relational parts of the brain stop growing at the same rate, and the aggression and sexuality parts of the brain start growing much faster. And also in the studies of female newborns, the eye-engaging, the importance of making contact with each and every person happens in female babies predominantly.

[06:38]

Well, when you think about this, we have policies. Well, not only do we keep our eyes down in zazen, but we don't make eye contact with each other. This may be very satisfying to men, and maybe and I'm bringing up the question, doesn't engage women as fully as we might be engaged in this practice? To really let our spiritual jewel shine, how much more contact might we need with our hands and with our eyes? So these questions were important to me. It turns out they may have been important to other women too. And as I went to nuns practice places in Japan, I noticed that there was a different feeling. You know, in the West, we take for granted that men and women practice together.

[07:42]

But in Asia, everywhere in Asia, men and women practice separately, except in temples for Westerners. So there's a different flavor, just like if you go to Korea, then it's a different flavor than it is in Japan and so on. And the flavor of Buddhism in India is a different flavor. There's a different flavor in Inanna's practice. And it takes me to early on, I did a, in 1992, did a practice period with just women at Rinsoen. It was the first time that they had had a women's practice period there in the history of the temple. And Huitzu Roshi disclosed that he was terrified. He didn't know what to expect. And his terror turned into a reality when he took us shopping for kimonos at the used kimono shop. And there were 12 women, and the kimonos were kind of flying through the air as we went through these big piles.

[08:50]

And his terror was quite palpable at that time. But one of the things, Ravi was there, and one of the things that Ravi said was that he noticed that we touched each other a lot. And in fact, the experience of the women being there in the temple together, the dozen of us, was a feeling of returning almost to the womb or to... the family, and re-parenting ourselves in a way. And we call ourselves the Sangha Sisters, and we have meetings every year still since 1992. So I became interested in some of these differences. And I became interested in these differences not because of the circumstances of male, female, or any other

[09:51]

variety of personhood is better than another, but because finding a way to practice despite circumstances and conditions, the most intimate way to practice, was of great interest to me. Now, for my own, for those of you who don't know me, I have a a Zen temple with residential capabilities. And it's in the foothills of the Sierras, that's where I live. And I have several groups, one that meets there, and one that meets in Fresno, and one that meets in Modesto. And Also, we do the training, the Shogaku priests ongoing training, which will be more open to Sangha leaders there.

[10:54]

And so, as I stepped more into a teaching role, it became all the more urgent to me to, for myself, know what it is that has flowed to us from our ancestors and enlivens and animates each moment of our life. What is it? And because I'm married, and because I did a practice period at Tassajara, and my husband assured me that he would be joining me there when health froze over, I felt that I needed to really find ways to do that kind of deep practice that didn't separate me from my relationship, that just wasn't wholesome. I remember meeting with Dupont Roshi, who was a dharma-era son, and he said to me, how can you be married and be a priest?

[12:05]

And I said to him, I keep all my vows. And I think it's important for us in relationship to see this as a kind of practice, a place where we really work on being present and not self-centered, and that we find ways to do this. So because of my relationship and my husband's relationship to the practice, he's a priest now, I trained in Japan. And I said, well, I went to a Renanzai temple. I just happened to have rapport or chemistry with the teacher there. I need to find a way to really get the ego kicked around, but not spend a month away from my husband. So that was how I developed my own practice. And in that capacity had the great circumstances and benefits and advantages of going to various and many temples in Japan to feel the different practices there.

[13:10]

Also because I couldn't do so many practice periods at Tassahara because of my relationship, which was very important to me. And is very important to me. I did the Dendo Shoshi training in Japan, which is essentially a boot camp. and only they forgot we weren't 16-year-old boys. We had these 50-year-old women and myself, almost 60, doing this practice that didn't really make any sense for us. They had very strict rules about how we couldn't go out of our rooms at certain times. It's like, go out of our rooms? We're so exhausted, we might not even be able to get out of bed. But we followed all the rules, more or less. In spending time in Japan, I became aware of the circumstances and conditions and the way practices adapt. And in particular, the women and the history of the women's practice has been very adaptive.

[14:16]

At the time that the four orders were established, the nuns tried to do essentially the same practice, but Also were, at least as history reports, there's some questions on this right now, and it's coming in over the newswire that this actually didn't happen from the Buddhist time, but later. The nuns were submissive to the monks, so they had to take their teaching from the monks, and they couldn't teach themselves in the same way that we can today. But as the practice moved throughout the many countries, Women often didn't have a convent to go to. So they had to invent ways to express the depth of their religious devotion. Sometimes they self-ordained. Sometimes if they had a particularly moving lecture that they went to, they just shake their heads.

[15:19]

They went home and practiced as nuns in their own household. And many of the nuns who came from the imperial family, something like, in one era, 70% of the emperor's daughters became nuns, and they developed a princess convent, so that they were very comfortable, but they were able to do practices there. And they devoted their practices to the well-being of their families. There are not so many stories of yet, I say yet, of women practicing in the midst of family, but I do talk about one, Tachivana no Somiko, in my book. And so there were the circumstances of where they could practice. There were many laws that restricted their travel throughout Asian countries where Confucian ethics were observed.

[16:22]

Women belonged to their families. and then they belong to their husbands, and then they belong to their sons. So that they did not have the capacity to travel. And so how they, or to make choices for themselves, how they chose to find a way to practice, no matter where they were, should be a very big interest to us. Some of you are enjoying the benefits of monastic practice, which is a joy and a gift. But many of us, I would say, more than 90% of Buddhists in this country do not live in monasteries. And how will we find these ways to practice that meet our lives, so that it's not just a half an hour on the cushion in the morning and the evening, But it's a whole life of practice.

[17:25]

It's a practice from when you get out of bed and you go to choose your clothing, you put your feet on the floor and say, what costume am I trying to put over myself today? How do we find these practices that meet us just where we are? So today I wanted to talk a little bit about Rengetsu, who lived from 1791 to 1875. And part of the reason I want to talk about Rangyatu is because I love her so much and because I refer to her so much in my own life whenever I'm moaning about something or other. I think about her life. And because when I became ordained as a priest and was kind of looking around for what would that mean for me as a woman, you know, with grown children, now I have grandchildren, in a marriage, what would that mean?

[18:28]

What would it look like? And I knew it would be hard for me to imitate my own teacher, a man. And so I found some words in a Zen calendar. These were the first... words and teachings of a woman. Clad in black robes, I should have no attachments to the things of this world. But how can I keep my vows gazing at today's crimson maple leaves? And this poem of vulnerability and failure and joy and everything else that's included in it moved me very deeply, differently than the conquest language of great Zen masters who have, you know, put everything aside.

[19:30]

But this ongoing process of examining the silly thoughts, the attachments, the love, the craving, that arrives in each moment as an ongoing practice for even an accomplished Buddhist nun really moved me and gave me a kind of taste of how I could inhabit this practice with my own silly self. Actually, I wanted to give you some quotes before I talk specifically about Rangetsu. from Philly Mountain, Zen Master Hanshan, who lived from 1546 to 1623 in China. If we are to discuss the conditions of this great matter, although it is originally inherent in everyone, actually complete in each individual, lacking nothing at all, nevertheless,

[20:36]

For beginningless ages, the seeds of the root of attachment, subjective ideas, and emotional thinking had become so deeply ingrained as habits that they block and cover the subtle light and port its real true function. Living totally within the shadows of these subjective ideas of body, mind, and world, you therefore flow in the waves of birth and death. You can't really swim. You can barely keep your head above water, and we know how it turns out in the end. Our mind and body are by nature pure, but we sully them with selfish thoughts and deeds. In order to restore ourselves to our original purity, we need only to cleanse away the accumulated dirt. But how do we proceed with the cleansing process? Do we put a barrier between us and the occasions of our bad habits?

[21:40]

Do we remove ourselves from the places of temptation? No. No, we do not. We cannot claim victory by avoiding the battle. The enemy, the obsturations, is not our surroundings or our circumstances. It is our own self-clinging. So, to start, which is to say, we need to find a way to practice throughout all circumstances. We can't make our world pure. We can try, but this is kind of losing. We're looking at the finger and not doing that. So, Ren Getsu was orphaned and adopted at a young age. She was well-educated and twice married. and excelled at everything, you know, as many of these women are made into iconic figures afterwards.

[22:43]

She was married at 16 to a young samurai, possibly physically abused. She had three children who died at an early age, and after her first husband died, she remarried again. But by the time she was 33, Her second husband had died as well, and she returned to live with her adoptive father, a Pure Land Buddhist priest on the grounds of Chionji Temple, with one child who also died. She found a measure of peace, was ordained in the Pure Land School, and studied Zen and Shingon Buddhism. And as she became a nun, she was thereafter known as Rengetsu, Lotus Moon. And she devoted herself to practice. But there's a song like this. If it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all. Rengetsu's home in the temple was not secure.

[23:47]

Her dwelling there depended on her adoptive father's position as head priest. There would be no way as a woman she would be considered and recognized as a leader of the temple. So when her adoptive father died eight years later, she was forced to leave the temple. and to think about how she could support herself. And this was often the case with nuns. Much less often could they rely on support from the community or the institutional support that the monks had. She considered becoming a tutor of the game of go. I don't know if you know go, but go is to chess as chess is to checkers. It's extremely important. Difficult game. But she concluded that men would not like to be instructed and surpassed by a woman. Instead, she decided to sell pottery. And I brought some of her pottery with me today with a specific poem on it.

[24:48]

And it's the only place you want to take that teapot out so you all can see it and Elizabeth will walk around with it. If you come to The book signing question and answer after the lecture will be put your hands on Rengiz's teapot. She left behind 50,000 pieces of art. Of course, we can't tell, I know this one is hers, but I have a certain feeling in my body when I get around Rengiz's art. But the poem, not only would she gather the clay with her own hands, She would not use a wheel. She formed all her pots and teacups with her hands. So when I touch it, this is Dogen's expression that time flows forward and backwards. I feel her hands. I feel that warm connection to her on that teapot. The poem she wrote on that, which I've never found anywhere else, just on this one example of this poem on this pot.

[25:55]

Wind blows across Katata Bay. that's Lake Biwa, Katata Bay is in Lake Biwa, a forsaken boat unmoving on the icy stillness. And I found the teapot online, and I showed it to Barbara Rouge, who's the director of the Institute of Medieval Japanese Studies, which essentially studies the work of the nuns. And she was so excited to tell me that Lake Biwa, was a metaphor for a woman's life. The waves and wind that blow the boat. And the reference to the stillness is that finding meditation was a way to find stability in all this upheaval of a woman's life. So I'll read it again. wind blowing across Katata Bay, a forsaken boat, unmoving on the icy stillness.

[27:05]

So even in this hardship of winter, there was something to find. So I guess how Rengetsu exemplifies for me her bringing her practice into every area, her personal life, the life of loss, not just being blown away by that. Imagine losing the children, the husbands, the home, the parents, everything, facing it on your own at a time when, you know, things were rather limited. This was before the Meiji Restoration, when women had very few rights. And so she would fetch the clay with her own hands, form objects that could be used in ordinary life, they could be handled, they could be touched, they could remind people of these Zen teachings. But that wasn't enough.

[28:06]

She would carve these Zen poems in the cups so that you were drinking in the wisdom. Very tangible, very connected teachings. and part of everyday life. Most families in Kyoto during her lifetime had something of Rangetsu in the kitchen. And she was, in terms of her relationship, even though she was a nun, she wrote poems about her husband's death, the evanescence of this floating world I feel over and over it is hardest to be the one left behind. So, as Hanshan said, it isn't in avoiding the connection.

[29:19]

It's about facing it thoroughly, finding the way to let the circumstances and conditions become the practice. I'm always moved when I read the poem she wrote for her children, the ones who had died so young, all of them. One of the ways that Rengetsu teaches and her dharma comes through is that she paints this really beautiful picture but she steps out. So there's space for you to step in and feel it. So on the subject of her deceased children, she chose the site of an historical battle where a father and son, warriors both, said their goodbyes, knowing that they were going to their own deaths in this battle. And this place, Sakurai Village, the samurai father compared life

[30:28]

to the brief but glorious blooming of the cherry blossoms he beheld there. Rengetsu shares her suffering with others, but claims nothing special about her loss. How sweet and how heartbreaking this impermanent human condition is for all of us, but it isn't for us to avoid. So her poem for her children, my final message, Flowers looming with all their heart in lovely Zachariah village. Though this is a poem about all you can do for however long or however brief your life is, is to bloom fully, to engage fully, to get your silly thoughts seen and enjoyed, moving right along.

[31:30]

We don't have to judge them. We don't have to condemn them. We don't have to repress them. But we do need to develop enough presence to not let them pull us around. And this is what we do in Zazen. We practice in Zazen developing the presence with each thought and each sensation as it arises. And when we get off the cushion, now we have a real test. It's not quiet. It's not all peace and joy. Things are coming at us. How will we find our presence? I learned when I practiced in Japan at the Rinzai Temple. I call it Animal House Den. They have a different concept. of practicing. You know, here in the West, we make our zendos very quiet and peaceful so people can relax and open up and let this spiritual energy flow through them.

[32:36]

And I was shocked when I did my first seshin, which was a few more hours from three in the morning till midnight. It's not like you got a night's sleep, you got a wink. But, you know, sleep deprivation was part of the program, so that was okay. But the shock wasn't that. I knew about the schedule ahead of time. The shock was what was going on in the Zendo. There were maybe 12 to 15 young months, and they were getting beaten. I would say four times a period, whatever it is, 10 or 15 periods a day. That means three or four times. shoulder, the big stick, more like a baseball bat, and the monitors would stand up on their tiptoes. I can't say that I agree with this methodology. It certainly didn't have anything to do with me. There were times I felt like I wanted to just get up and say, you have to stop this, but then I realized, oh, how is this going to affect

[33:42]

young men who've been raised in a culture that they want to do what their ancestors did, for some little old lady to come and say, this isn't very nice. You know, it's not going to do the job. So I spoke to the Roshi about it, and he said, well, you know, sometimes these guys get carried away. But there were also times when, because they knew each other very intimately, and they would know when the skin had become completely raw on the back, then they would come after them. with a stick, and they wore big belts, and they would attack them from the front, so they would do a backward flip. So this was what was going on during Sazen. There's an expression, I think, I don't know if it comes from the Bible, smooth seas do not good sailors make. You needed, I needed to find out, I couldn't sit in this kind of environment. It took me a while to figure out why my suffering was so intense. After all of these sessions I'd done in the West, I couldn't figure it out until I realized, oh, I'm counting hits, I'm not counting my breath.

[34:49]

And I had to learn to bring my concentration deeper. So the more deeply we apply ourselves to our zazen, the more composure we develop on the cushion, the more we can find the way. ride these ways in our lives. I thought I would give you a few minutes just to open up a discussion about this, and we will be continuing the discussion, the Q&A and the book signing, and the hands-on Rangetsu teapot will be happening in a small dining room, but if you had some questions, we could start here. It's a different culture, and that's an important consideration.

[35:56]

How we come up, we can't just... The question was, I'm surprised that these nuns were beaten. The nuns do different things. I think... It's more of a bitchiness, my experience. I spent what seemed like a year over the weekend with the nuns, and that was different. It's like they wouldn't call me for my bath. I was warned, though. I read Paula Wright's book about it. But the culture is completely different, and so the methods are different. And to the extent that we understand what's culturally appropriate for us and our practice and adapt, This is a very important thing for Westerners. We can't do what they do, and it doesn't make sense for us in our bodies to imitate something that doesn't coalesce with our own cultural norms. So there's a way that we need to find things to do that are our own, and we're working on it.

[36:58]

The first 500 years are the hardest. And then it's down. Yes. I had an opinion about the stick and the beatings before the Hatsu Sashim, where Blanche introduced it to all of us, and I loved it. I was falling asleep, and then all of a sudden I was awake and released, and I said, you know, please, sir, can I have some more? And so those things may even help. Yeah, well, we don't use the stick the same way. Yeah. I mean, they literally stood up on their tiptoes, these young men, and with their full strength, came down as hard as they can. It was different. I think if I had taken one hit, they would have had to send me to the hospital. I mean, literally, my back might have broken. But I agree, and it was very politically incorrect. We had some discussion of this at Berkeley Zen Center, and mainly Scott was alive then, and we had this whole discussion, and we wanted to outlaw them the stick, and so I just said, well, that's all very nice.

[38:07]

Thank you very much. And then he said, we'll announce it so people aren't terrified when they hear it, you know, women who've been abused, you know, don't have a meltdown and so on. But frankly, I wanted that stick when I had those knots in my shoulder the way we use it here. But I couldn't ask for it because it was politically incorrect. So I know this is a difficulty. We also instituted some sort of acupressure. So we need to find our way with it. I keep the stick. in my Zendo, but I haven't yet to use it. And I got some lessons from Huizu, and I'm not sure I'm going to be very good at it. So, you know, we'll see if anybody else has a better aim in the Zendo. I just know that what they were doing didn't apply to us. Yeah, yeah. Well, the thing that we need to understand is that for someone to die in a monastery over there,

[39:15]

There's no charges pressed. Someone was telling me that... I'm watching her very carefully take the lid off. Would you leave the lid on there? Thank you. I'm reminded of a story where a monk went into a temple and the Roshi accidentally, when he hit him, or hit him in the head, hit him too hard. And he died. But this wasn't, it's like when you go into a temple in Japan, you might die. So, you know, there weren't any charges pressed. That's just the way it was. It wouldn't work here. Yes? What was the point of Hiji from that part of the stick? I asked Hoi Tsuroshi. The question was, what was the point of hitting them that hard with the stick?

[40:17]

And I asked Ritsu Roshi about it, and he said he thought it was a carryover from samurai culture. Yes? So the feeling I get from what you're saying, Grace, is that very much our way is that our daily life and our relationships are not under destruction. but actually the vehicle for our practice. But the quotation, one of the quotations that you quoted there, I think it was was speaking about it as though it were an instruction in something. The obscuration. Yeah, the obscuration. Right. Yes, thank you. The question is, if our relationships are not an obstruction to our practice, but the vehicle of our practice, I read a quote that described the obscurations. The obscurations are not the circumstances and conditions, but our relationship to the circumstances and conditions.

[41:24]

So where we create the difficulty is not, you know, when we have a spouse that's grumpy, perhaps. That's not the problem. That's not the obscuration. I call it witbo, wishing it to be otherwise. When we are attached to it coming out a certain way, these are our self-centered view which creates self-entanglement. That's the obscuration. Whether it's in the zendo, feeling that your form is so perfect, you know how to do everything, that's an obscuration. But it's not... An obstruction to practice is a place to wake up. Or if you feel you're the worst one. When my students say, well, I'm the worst one, I say, well, stop bragging. You know, you claim the last place to really reify yourself and your self-image. Those are the obscurations, not the circumstances and conditions. Whatever our life presents us with, we can practice with, yes.

[42:25]

Self-interest is... Extinct? I wish. So far, I have heard, especially from the Tibetan schools, that there is such a place where self-clinging no longer arises. I have yet to meet a single living individual who, by my appraisal, met that description. And my teacher in Japan said... Even the Buddha and Bodhidharma go on practicing. I think I need to end now so we can move along to the next section. So thank you very much for your questions, and I think we will continue the discussion.

[43:16]

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