Zen Women

Beyond Tea Ladies, Iron Maidens, and Macho Masters

Grace Schireson

• Publisher: Wisdom Publications
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780861719563
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Buddhismus

This landmark presentation at last makes heard the centuries of Zen's female voices. Through exploring the teachings and history of Zen's female ancestors, from the time of the Buddha to ancient and modern female masters in China, Korea, and Japan, Grace Schireson offers us a view of a more balanced Dharma practice, one that is especially applicable to our complex lives, embedded as they are in webs of family relations and responsibilities, and the challenges of love and work.Part I of this book describes female practitioners as they are portrayed in the classic literature of "Patriarchs' Zen"--often as "tea-ladies, " bit players in the drama of male students' enlightenments; as "iron maidens, " tough-as-nails women always jousting with their male counterparts; or women who themselves become "macho masters, " teaching the same Patriarchs' Zen as the men do. Part II of this book presents a different view--a view of how women Zen masters entered Zen practice and how they embodied and taught Zen uniquely as women. This section examines many urgent and illuminating questions about our Zen grandmothers: How did it affect them to be taught by men? What did they feel as they trying to fit into this male practice environment, and how did their Zen training help them with their feelings? How did their lives and relationships differ from that of their male teachers? How did they express the Dharma in their own way for other female students? How was their teaching consistently different from that of male ancestors? And then part III explores how women's practice provides flexible and pragmatic solutions to issues arising in contemporary Western Zen centers.

Part I

ZEN’S WOMEN:

Women Transformed by Zen

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1

Women in Classical Zen Literature

What Is the Difference between Men and Women in Zen?

TO MENTION WOMEN in Zen is to jump right into the middle of a controversy about whether gender matters at all. Zen Buddhists and their Buddhist forebears have made the revolutionary declaration that there is no essential difference in the spiritual experience available to all human beings, regardless of class, race, or gender. The Zen tradition was established on core teachings that view all phenomenal appearance as empty of fixed substance. In this context, how could gender be the basis for any essential differentiation? Yet, Zen is historically an all-male tradition. How does the espoused theory match up with historical reality? The troublesome question of Zen and gender comes to life in an examination of the place of women in Zen’s history.

Questions about Zen and gender can be provocative: “Feminist propaganda! How could gender, an outward appearance, have anything to do with expressions of our essential nature?” Who can find a speck of difference between the buddha-nature of a mountain, a person, or an ocean, let alone an essential difference between the way men and women express their true nature in Zen practice? And yet the history of Zen practice is nearly void of even a trace of female ancestors. Were there none? If women practiced and taught, where are their records?

The obvious incongruity between this espoused ideal of a gender-free practice and the lack of information about Zen women should provoke us to look more deeply. But we are reluctant to talk about the disparity, because our lineages teach that there is no such thing as inequality in Zen. If we are respectful Zen Buddhists with deep understanding, we believe that the teaching requires us to see through all appearances of inequality as delusions.

In fact, one of the four documented disciples of Bodhidharma (the founder of Zen in China) was a woman: Zongchi, who is described by Japan’s founding Soto patriarch, Eihei Dogen. Women were practicing Zen from the beginning. Most cultures have placed a variety of restrictions on women engaging in activities outside the family, such as strictures about appearing in public, limited educational opportunities, obstacles to financial autonomy, and limited agency as decision makers (requiring women to yield to fathers, husbands, or sons). And so we find fewer women than men entering Zen practice. Given this, we would expect to find a small percentage of Zen lineage ancestors to have been female. Yet their numbers are still fewer.

Miriam Levering cites a Chinese census from the year 1021 that reported 61,240 nuns.³ Women represented approximately 13 percent of the ordained Buddhist population in thirteenth-century China, but women Zen masters comprised only 1 percent of the total number of the officially recorded monks in the transmission records. Study of later transmission records reveal that even this initially recorded 1 percent was further reduced, effectively erasing the record of the sixteen female Dharma heirs that had constituted that 1 percent. As a result, remaining records leave us with the distinct impression that Zen practice has always been an entirely male profession.

How did it happen that women participated alongside men historically but did not become an enduring part of the Zen record? How did a practice promising equality and liberation become a “Patriarchs’ Zen”? Discrepancies in the historical record and the resulting incomplete and inaccurate picture of an all-male Zen history raise many questions. What were the forces that engendered such reluctance to acknowledge women’s practice and erased female Zen masters from the historical record? Is that cultural and gender bias still embedded in our tradition, shaping our practice today?

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Women and Early Buddhist Practice

During the Buddha’s lifetime, Mahapajapati,⁴ the Buddha’s aunt and later his stepmother, expressed her wish to join the Buddha’s order along with her numerous followers. When the Buddha refused her plea, she repeated her aspiration to Ananda, the Buddha’s cousin and close disciple. Ananda tried three times to gain the Buddha’s permission and was admonished by the Buddha’s third refusal: “Enough!” Ananda had struck out—the rule was that any seeker could make only three identical requests—but he did not give up. Instead, he asked the Buddha if in fact women could attain enlightenment.

We are told that the Buddha eventually declared that women were capable of the same awakening as men. He agreed to allow women to enter his order, but only under a set of conditions and restrictions known as the Eight Special Rules. By including women in a subordinate position defined by these Eight Special Rules, the Buddha set two important traditions in motion: Women could leave home and could practice only with other women, and women could not establish equal or independent practice places. These rules have guided (and perhaps misguided) Buddhism from its inception and have affected the evolution of practice for women and men for over twenty-five hundred years.

The study of gender segregation and the development of two separate orders are relevant topics for all who have inherited Buddhist practice from Asian ancestors, and especially for those Western Buddhist founders who have been schooled by Asian teachers trained in the traditional Buddhist view of the nuns’ status as subordinate to the monks.

The Eight Special Rules:

1. A nun even of a hundred years’ standing shall respectfully greet, rise up in the presence of, bow down before, and perform all proper duties toward a monk ordained even a day.

2. A nun is not to spend the rainy season in a district where there is no monk.

3. Every half-moon, a nun is to await two things from the order of monks—the date of the Uposatha ceremony (communal confession of faults or violations of the monastic code) and the time monks will come to give teaching.

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4. After the rains retreat, the nuns are to hold Pavarana (an inquiry into whether any faults have been committed) before both sanghas—that of the monks and that of the nuns—in respect to what has been seen, what has been heard, and what has been suspected.

5. A nun who has been guilty of a serious offense must undergo discipline before both sanghas, that of the monks and that of the nuns.

6. When a novice has trained for two years in the six precepts (the first five precepts plus the precept of taking one meal a day before noon), she should seek ordination from both sanghas.

7. A nun is not to revile or abuse a monk under any circumstance.

8. Admonition of monks by nuns is forbidden; admonition of nuns by monks is not forbidden.⁵

These Eight Special Rules established the women’s order as secondary and subordinate to the monks’ order. Rules 2 and 5 established the nuns’ dependence on the monks’ guidance and the nuns’ vulnerability to the monks’ sanctions. Rules 7 and 8 specify that a nun is never to correct a monk. It is said that the one rule Mahapajapati protested was rule 1, that even the most senior nun was junior to the most junior monk. During the Buddha’s lifetime it appears that nuns lived with these rules and were acknowledged for their accomplishments even though their practice was dependent on the monks. As we shall see, over time the nuns’ institutionalized dependency confined them in a secondary position, impeded their ability to support themselves, and made it difficult for their order to continue.

Discussion of women in early Buddhism mirrored old cultural stereotypes that collided with Buddhist egalitarian principles of liberation for all beings. Alan Sponberg has suggested that Buddhism moved from a psychologically astute observation of sexual cravings and attraction (for example, describing how cravings for sex could be observed and not acted upon) to outright psychopathological misogyny.⁶ Ascetic misogyny in early Buddhism described a woman’s unremitting intention as “to ensnare a man,” and this diverted attention away from the inevitability of desire and one’s own responsibility for that desire to the object of the desire: women.

Westerners need to decide how to work with difficult passages in the Buddhist canon. There are four ways to consider the meaning of the apparently misogynistic remarks by the Buddha in the scriptures.

1. The Buddha, a perfectly realized being, made these remarks in a teaching context that we cannot reproduce or precisely imagine, since we weren’t there. We may read his seemingly misogynistic remarks without being troubled by them.

2. Later Buddhists inserted these words into the Buddhist canon. The Buddha, a perfectly realized being, would never have made such remarks. Nevertheless, the teachings should not be questioned.

3. Later Buddhists inserted these words into the Buddhist canon. We may address the negativity of these remarks provided that we clearly state that these and other misogynistic remarks do not come from the Buddha, a perfectly realized being, but come from other, less realized Buddhists at a later time.

4. The Buddha was a spiritual genius manifesting the most complete awakening that may unfold for a human being. He was, however, a human being and was therefore still living with his own karmic consequences and psychological reactivity, as evidenced by these remarks. He was therefore susceptible to a perception or belief that women’s sexual power could lead his monks astray to the detriment of his newly formed order. The Buddha’s tendency to objectify women and sexuality as a negative force needs to be considered as we transplant Buddhism to the West.

Westerners may choose not to examine the relevance of the early Buddhist attitude and customs toward women, but not without consequence for the transplanting of Buddhism to the West. In this work, my approach tends to take the fourth view, keeping in mind that one cannot be certain that twenty-five-hundred-year-old quotes are accurately attributed. We would do well to examine these misogynistic passages according to the Buddha’s own standards and advice to the Kalamas, villagers who asked him how to assess a spiritual teacher:

Rely not on the teacher but on the teaching. Rely not on the words of the teaching, but on the spirit of the words. Rely not on theory, but on experience. Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. Do not believe anything because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything because it is written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and the benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.⁷

Sponberg proposes that early Buddhists found the denigration of women familiar and natural because it conformed to an earlier Hindu view: if a person is born a female this is because of karmic forces leading to a lower rebirth. This view is encountered even today. At a contemporary Western Tibetan practice place I was once asked why we should be interested in studying the teachings of female ancestors since it is understood that being born a woman is considered within Buddhism to be an inferior birth. As women, how should we respond to this? Do we justify this Buddhist belief and consider how amazing it is that, despite our inferior female birth, we can teach the Dharma? Or do we consider that discrimination and prejudice were smuggled into our enlightened teachings and practice?

This view, along with the need to protect monks from women’s ensnaring ways, seems to have been incorporated into early Buddhist thinking and formed part of the basis for the Eight Special Rules. Early Buddhists believed ordaining women would create major obstacles for the acceptance, credibility, and continuation of their new order within the Hindu tradition. Allowing women equal entry would disturb the prevailing culture and threaten power relations in the future. To resolve the contradiction—that Buddhist women have equal capacity to awaken but are unequal participants—women were granted limited entry to ordination with a second-class status.

The Eight Special Rules significantly limited the development of women’s practice over the longer term. For one thing, they limited opportunities for the development of female teachers. Under these rules nuns were not only junior to monks without exception but also depended on monks for training and so could not become fully independent Dharma teachers. Furthermore, the rules had significant and lasting implications for the status of nuns. Nuns’ practice was not considered first-rate, and certainly not equivalent to monks’ practice. This made it difficult for nuns to attract followers and receive the donations necessary to support their practice. Throughout history, nuns’ convents were impoverished whereas monks’ monasteries, with their first-class status and well-recognized teachers, received greater donations and attracted more powerful supporters.

To this day the implicit judgment that nuns are second-tier practitioners may account for some of the relative lack of interest Westerners have displayed in studying early women Zen masters and their convents, practices, and leaders.

But if women were forbidden to practice with men, how did some women manage to become practice leaders and masters, as reported in the classic Zen literature? Clearly, at least some of the Eight Special Rules must have been bent or broken. If so, this may be related to the fact that early on Zen based its teaching on innate wisdom uncovered through meditation and declared itself not dependent on sutras or written word. Like all other Buddhist schools, however, the earliest Zen communities took direction from Buddhist scriptures mandating separate orders for men’s and women’s practice. On the other hand, exceptional male masters manifeste...