On Saturday November 27, 2021, SBZC was pleased to welcome back Ven. Karma Lekshe Tsomo as our Guest Teacher.

Karma Lekshe Tsomo began exploring Buddhism as a young girl because her family name was Zenn. In 1964, at the age of 19, she set off to Japan with her surfboard and wound up sitting zazen at a temple in Tokyo. In 1989, while studying Buddhism in India, she was bitten by a viper and barely survived. Returning to Hawai‘i, she completed a Ph.D. in comparative philosophy, focusing on women in Buddhism and death and dying. Her books include Into the Jaws of Yama: Buddhism, Bioethics, and Death and Women in Buddhist Traditions. While on lockdown, she’s planting papaya and plumeria on the North Shore of Oahu.

Dr. Tsomo's topic was The Koan of Gender.

Full Transcript

Okay, good. First, I thought I'd begin by asking us to adjust our motivation. Why are we here? Why do we practice dharma? What is the purpose of our life? Thank you.

I'd like to first show you some slides, some images, just to set the stage for this talk. And I have some images that I hope will sort of give you an idea of, um, I can get into. Okay, here we go. Can you see it? Okay, great.

So, the koan of gender is, I think, an interesting topic that somehow Rebecca and I hit upon. But I wanted to start from the beginning to show you, of course, some of the illustrious women in Buddhism, beginning at the beginning, which would be Mother Maya, the mother of Prince Siddhartha. And it reminds us that without women, none of us would be here and there would be no Prince Siddhartha and there would be no Buddha and there would be no Buddhism. So in fact, we can remember and express a debt of gratitude for all of the women who have suffered so much to bring us into the world and raise us with great compassion and wisdom.

Mother Maya was the first woman, illustrious woman in Buddhism, but she passed away when the prince was just seven days old. Nevertheless, his stepmother raised him from a babe and nursed him along with his cousin. He grew up in the palace, you know the Buddha story, and went to the forest, practiced austerities for six years and then accepted rice pudding from a young maiden from the village, Sujata, who nourished him so that he regained his strength. He gave up the fasting idea and decided to walk across the river, sit under the tree and achieve perfect awakening. So we owe a great debt of gratitude to Sujata, this village woman who was nurturing.

Now here's Mahapajapati. This is the woman who raised the young prince and later, after he achieved awakening, advocated for the admission of women to the Sangha. The first six years, there were only men in the Sangha, maybe the first monks and thousands of young men became monks. But when she advocated to join the Sangha, she requested to join the Sangha. At first, the Buddha hesitated. Some say he flat out refused, but I think he hesitated because it was dangerous for women to go wandering in the forest in those days and even today. But she persevered. She led what might be the first women's liberation movement in the world and walked across Northern India to Vaisali with 500 noble women. They shaved their heads, they dressed in robes and they went and asked again and again until Ananda, friend of women, successfully advocated for their admission to the Sangha.

The point he used actually was, well, didn't Mahapajapati nurture you when you were a babe? And the Buddha said yes. And then, do women have equal potential to become awakened? Yes. Would it then be well if women were allowed to join the Sangha? Okay, so the Buddha agreed and she became the leader of the bhikshuni Sangha until her death at a ripe old age.

The Buddha taught men and women alike. After all, the whole point of Buddhism is transformation of the mind and women have that same potential. He affirmed this and this is where the Buddhists are rather ahead of the game among the world's religions that we have a fairly clear statement. Of course, all the texts were transmitted orally. We have no historical documentation in fact, but we have this clear statement from Buddha Shakyamuni affirming that women do indeed have the potential to achieve the fruits of the path up to and including liberation.

So thousands of women became nuns at that time, thousands of them became arhats as the story goes, and they made up a very important sector of the Buddhist community. The Buddha said that a healthy Buddhist society is one with four components: lay men, lay women, ordained men, ordained women. So in this picture, which I found on the wall of a meditation center in southern Laos, you'll see the lay men to the left, lay women, and on the right, the monks, and then the nuns. One who appears to be a bhikshuni, fully ordained in the traditional sense of the monastic ordination, and one in white, who is an adaptation since the bhikshuni sangha has died out in the Theravada countries, but still many thousands of women live as nuns in Theravada countries. So she's one example.

Now the next illustrious woman that we find mentioned in the text is Sanghamitta, in the third century before Christ, before the common era, the daughter of King Ashoka was invited to Sri Lanka to give the dharma and also to ordain Queen Anumma. And she proceeded by ship, which was a very dangerous journey at that time, with her retinue and a sampling of the Bodhi tree, a very famous incident, a very famous chapter in Sri Lankan history. And the descendant of that Bodhi tree is said to exist even up to today in Anuradhapura. Sanghamitta is a very popular figure. In fact, there's a national holiday named after her, Sanghamitta day, and it may be the only national holiday in the world named after a woman. So that's notable.

After this, we find a big blank in Buddhist history. We don't find the names of many women for centuries, but we know that they persisted up to the present day. To give you some examples, this is Sri Lanka. This is Southern monks. And see, they don't get too much to eat, but they persevere. In Burma, where they've made an adaptation of the robes, white is the color of laypeople. So and they're not allowed to wear the orange of the fully ordained monks, so they found their way. And women in Burma can get a month off for meditation from their jobs. So they're supported in that way. This is Vietnam with over 20,000 fully ordained nuns. Korea, where they practice meditation intensively and have produced generations of illustrious women.

Now in the Tibetan tradition, there are many archetypes of awakened women, including Tara in 21 aspects and many more. So these are an inspiration for women in the Tibetan tradition who practice kind of meditation of visualization, visualizing themselves as fully awakened beings, including as fully awakened women and men. So historically, women in the tradition were not fully in the picture, and education was restricted to men in the monasteries. But these days, in the last 35 years, they've made great strides in education, in learning all of the rituals, including the ritual instruments, which women never played before, including attending international conferences and speaking at international conferences. The younger generation today doesn't even know that in the past, they weren't able to get an education. They take it for granted, and they're doing exceptionally well, bringing meditation to women throughout the Himalayan region and beyond.

This is the first group of geshe, geshe ma, the feminine ending. I mentioned that the great monastic universities of Tibet were closed to women. Women were excluded from the halls of education and hence religious authority. But in 2017, the first group of 20 nuns passed the degree of geshe, the highest degree in philosophy, with flying colors, including six of my students. So they are now becoming teachers and translators. Some are going into retreat. They're doing great work.

The remaining bastion of power, of course, is the full ordination of women. And in many countries, it's available, such as China, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, and so forth, throughout the Chinese diaspora, Malaysia, Singapore, and so on. But in the Tibetan tradition, women can only be novices. And in the Theravada countries, they have this marginal status where they wear white or Burma pink and hold eight, nine, or ten precepts, but are not even accorded the status of novice ordination. So we're working on this ordination issue, and it's going forward very slowly, but we persist. So there was a conference in Germany to discuss the issue. We expected a positive result. Unfortunately, it didn't quite work out as we hoped, but for the sake of the future generations, we hoped to be successful.

So I'd like to introduce Aoyama Roshi, Aoyama Shindo, who is noted as the leading female Zen master in Japan today. I've just written her biography, and I think I sent a copy to Rebecca. If not, I'll send that in, and she can share it with all of you. And she's a remarkable figure, a scholar, and she has trained generations of female Zen masters in Japan at Aoyama Monastery, where she has a training center that she created. And when you read the story, you can see how they struggled. But although people think that the Order of Nuns has died out in Japan, in fact, thanks to her, it's still quite vibrant. This was the 60th anniversary of the All Japan Nuns Association, and there were a wonderful group of women in Tokyo. I was fortunate to be there. And there are said to be something like 2,000 ordained nuns in Japan. But of course, today, also temple wives are taking more and more visible roles as leaders of temples. So things are changing throughout the world.

Here we have Monja Kouan, who was a student of Aoyama Roshi, and she is now the leading teacher of Zen in Brazil. So I would get mistaken for her in airports throughout Brazil. Ah, Monja Kouan, no, you got the wrong one. We all look alike. But she is so popular, and has written many, many books on Zen, and such a wonderful example of a really fully qualified Zen master. And she also has disciples of her own.

So these are the organizations that we've developed over the years. Jamyang Foundation is for education of women in developing countries. And Sakyadhita is the International Association of Buddhist Women. And we welcome you. So and we have a branch in Hawaii, which is where I live, and will be returning in a few short weeks. So you're all welcome to visit anytime.

To talk a little bit further about the koan of gender in Buddhism, and to introduce some of the illustrious women in Buddhism, we can begin, as I said, by admitting that we know very little about Buddhism for much of Buddhist history. Whether this is because Buddhist women were very well behaved, practicing quietly in the temples and their homes, or because their voices simply have been silenced or ignored, maybe both, is a salient question. In either case, as the adage goes, well behaved women rarely make history.

So although women have been actively involved in practicing Buddhism and maintaining Buddhist teachings and traditions from the very beginning, the history of Buddhism that we have in books is a history of men. Buddhist women today are doing our best to change this, but the discrepancy between women's achievements and their public acknowledgement or notability remains a major koan that Buddhists can ponder.

In 2009, we were planning the 10th Sakyadhita International Conference on Buddhist Women, these conferences that we've been organizing every two years since 1987. This one was to be held in Vietnam, and we had decided on the theme, eminent Buddhist women. But some of the leading monks objected. There are no eminent Buddhist women, they claimed. They insisted that we change the theme because women cannot be eminent. After our initial shock, the foreign delegation on the committee, we thought they were joking, but we realized they were serious and insisted that there have indeed been many eminent Buddhist women and we should celebrate them. We persevered, we refused to relent to the male power structures and had a wonderful conference highlighting the achievements of eminent Buddhist women. After the conference, 20 of these papers were compiled into a popular book called Eminent Buddhist Women.

This incident points to the discrepancy between rhetoric and reality around gender in the Buddhist world, in Buddhist societies. Why are Buddhist women not adequately recognized for their many qualities and achievements? On one hand, we hear public declarations by laymen and monks who loudly proclaim that women and men are equal in Buddhism. On the other hand, we see that those who are invited to speak at important events are inevitably male and women have virtually no power in Buddhist institutions. That is until 1987 when we created Sakyadhita. That's why we created Sakyadhita. If we had no voice in Buddhist institutions, then we create our own institutions. That's what we did and it's going great.

That year, Buddhist women from around the world met in Bodhgaya, the site of Buddha Shakyamuni's awakening. We met to discuss what to do about women's subordination and marginalization in the world's Buddhist traditions. The recurrent theme was education. Without education, we couldn't get very far. This is something I think that women in the West take for granted, that at least we have 12 years of mandated public education and we have roughly equal opportunities for higher education. In most of the Buddhist world, this has not been the case. In recent history, there are some exceptions, but in much of the Buddhist world, women remain illiterate and without literacy and without education, there's little they can do to change their circumstances. Even in the ordinary world, in business and so forth, the average nun in Thailand has a fourth grade education. Women get cheated in business and so forth, not to mention their subordinate status in Buddhism.

This may come as a surprise to some of you who have only been introduced to Buddhism in the West. In the West, there is greater equality. I will not say full equality. I've been doing this for a very long time. I can attest that equality and equal opportunities in Buddhism, even in the West, are a myth in many situations, in many temples, in many Dharma centers. I was happy to go to Mount Shasta and find men in the kitchen, actually. I love to see that there's no more heartwarming site than seeing men wash dishes.

The issue is greater than simply squeezing women into existing institutions, though that might be a good start. In Korea, they've actually elected two nuns to the leadership positions in certain sub-departments of the largest Buddhist organization there, the Chogye Order. The first one did so well that they actually elected a second one. Gradually, things are beginning to change. The issue is transforming Buddhist institutions or creating new ones that are suited to women's needs and unique capabilities.

To what extent can women relate to or be expected to fit into categories that we have had little or no role in shaping? How relevant or useful are these institutions if they've been fashioned without any input from half the Buddhist population? How can women challenge the categories and stereotypes of women that abound? The ubiquitous women have bad karma, and we even hear it in many Buddhist countries, women are stupid. Unfortunately, sadly, many women internalize these preconceptions and stereotypes of women. So we've really had our work cut out for us. Because these stereotypes and these subordinate roles relegate them to this inferior category, especially when women are educationally disadvantaged and missing from the decision-making process. Without education, they can't even read the stories of these illustrious Buddhist women who have existed in Buddhist history, starting from the beginning.

So enlightenment is the quality of the mind, and mind has no gender. But in order to realize that, women need proper facilities and educational opportunities. And of course, gender is a koan in the sense that right now we may identify with one particular gender or another. But throughout our trajectory, since beginningless time, we've taken birth again and again and again, in different genders at different times. So it's rather something of an illusion, our attachments to gender. But we have to recognize that we have to be able to understand that our attachments to gender are illusory, because in one breath, we could be off to the next life and have an entirely different gender.

So we're fortunate that the Buddha Shakyamuni affirmed women's equal spiritual capacity, and thousands of female arhats at the time, and they proved him correct. Their contributions, the contributions of this earliest generation of Buddhist women are memorialized in the Therigatha, 73 verses by 70 women. This is said to be the first example of poetry or verse written by women in the world, written by Buddhist women, most of whom were nuns. And they're lovely, I'm sure you've read some of them. You know, "now I'm free from pots and pans and my crooked husband," as they go off to the monastery.

So it mentions the Buddhist text, the early Buddhist text also mentioned the achievements of prominent women by name. We already met Mahapajapati Gotami, the founder of the bhikshuni sangha and stepmother of the Buddha, who led the order of nuns for decades, until her death. There was Khema, who was renowned for her great wisdom. Uppalavanna and Patacara, who were praised for their monastic discipline. Dhammadinna, who was famous for teaching Dhamma. There was Nanda, who was lauded for her dedication. Soma for her energetic striving. So Ananda, who is beloved of women in Japan, they have a special ritual to Ananda.

Annually, they will recite a text called "Ingratitude to Ananda," who served a pivotal role in allowing women to join the Sangha. Now, not all women will become nuns, of course, but symbolically, if women are excluded from the Sangha, the monastic Sangha, it sends a message that women are somehow inferior. We see this in Buddhist countries where there is no order of fully ordained nuns. We see that, in fact, women are subordinate in the hierarchy, obviously, because that's the way the hierarchy is set up.

But there were also illustrious Buddhist laywomen, and Vishaka is the model. She was the daughter of a millionaire. And she was just seven years old when she first heard the Dhamma, and she totally resonated with it. They say at the age of seven, she became a Sattapanna, which means a stream enterer. That's the first stage of awakening in the Shravakayana, or what we call the Theravada tradition. She became renowned for her generous support of the Sangha. And she was known for her integrity, so much so that she was considered the ultimate adjudicator in case of complaints about the monks' conduct, that they would go not to the nuns, but to her, to a laywoman. She was renowned for her elegant manners, her refinement, her courteous speech, a good example for all, especially for laywomen.

Now, of course, the texts are problematic. They send conflicting messages about women. On one hand, they're praised. On the other hand, they're denigrated, in the sense that often the texts consider or portray women as obstacles to men's path to liberation. Even going back so far as the Buddha sitting under the Bodhi tree and being beset by the daughters of Mara, a story every Buddhist knows. And these were seductresses. They were temptresses. So the image of women from the very beginning was a seducer of men, an obstacle to men's liberation.

In the Anguttara Nikaya, we find women portrayed as uncontrollable, curious, envious, greedy, weak in wisdom. And I always think this is so interesting that women are portrayed as sexually uncontrollable. Women. Yeah, that's sweet. The snare of Mara. And of course, here, we have to put it in context. We have to realize that the Buddha, if these are indeed his words, we don't have any strong evidence, that he was talking to an audience of monks, and he wanted them to stay as monks. So he wanted to warn them against the downfalls of losing their precepts, their precepts of celibacy specifically. And so if he had been talking to an audience of women, no doubt he would have explained it in the opposite direction, men as the temptress of women.

So on the other hand, we have many positive images of women in the texts, as kind and caring and full of unbounded loving kindness. The Metta Sutra shows, it gives the mother as the image of the kindest, most caring model that we can have, the loving kindness, like a mother to her only child. We see the life-giving power of women portrayed in the text and the Buddhist statement that a girl child may turn out to be even better than a boy child, which was really counter-cultural at that time. But at the same time, we see that women are often associated with the bondage of samsara because of their reproductive power. They continue to produce children who maintain the cycle of samsara. Association of women with suffering and bondage is problematic.

At the same time, we have to, again, see things in the historical context, the social context, and recognize that Buddhist societies actually were ahead of the game in terms of women's prestige and opportunities. In Buddhist societies, women had the right to divorce. In most Buddhist societies, girls had some voice in their marriage. Of course, they had access to dharma, and even in many societies had opportunities to become nuns to join the monastery, and that's the case even today. That's an option for women. We find that in India today, India and Nepal throughout the Buddhist world, very few young men are becoming monks, but many women are becoming nuns.

I've already introduced these famous figures from early India, such as Sanghamita, who courageously took the dharma to Sri Lanka. But in the Tibetan tradition also, we find a number of illustrious Buddhist women. One actually in the Tibetan texts was Indian. She was a Kashmiri princess. You may know the story. This book is really remarkable. In the hidden land, I hear they've been reading it, and it tells so many wonderful stories about women in different Buddhist traditions.

The Gelongma Palmo, she was called a bhikshuni, even though in Tibet there were no bhikshunis historically. But she became a princess, and then she became a nun, and she became a teacher of hundreds of monks, and very famous as a teacher. But then she contracted leprosy, and they kicked her out of the monastery. Heartbroken, she went to the forest, but her limbs were falling off her nose, ears, everything, fingers. And she just had one serving woman, and she was staying in the forest, and so depressed and disappointed. And then she prayed to Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion for help, and had a vision of Avalokiteshvara, who gave her a particular fasting practice that we call nyungne. And through this practice of fasting, which is a rigorous practice of alternating fasting and lots of prostrations and chanting, she actually cured her leprosy, and her limbs were restored. So obviously it's a hagiography, it's a story, but it's a powerful story, and she's become wildly popular in the Tibetan world. So you find that in villages throughout the Himalayas, they will set aside days and even an entire month, a fourth lunar month, where they do these fasting practices.

We have Machik Labdron, who's a remarkable figure. And you know, even in the present day, we have the two sisters of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who set up the Tibetan Children's Village in Dharamsala for these thousands of young children who lost their parents when the Tibetans came to India, into exile in India, escaping the communist takeover of Tibet. One of my teachers was from China, and she became the first professor, first nun to become a professor at a public university in Taiwan. It was a real breakthrough. If we go through the history, we find all these many, many breakthroughs.

So in general, we could see that Buddhism is renowned for teaching compassion, and is compassion for all beings, all sentient beings. I think in Japan they even included some blades of grass, from what I hear, which is pretty radical. But surely, if we're admitting that even cockroaches can become fully awakened, then obviously we need to include women too. So this is my story, and I'm sticking to it. And if anyone has any questions, I'd be happy to. Thank you.