Spotlight On: Three Newly Emerging Theravada Bhikkhuni Projects for the 2600th Bhikkhuni Sangha Anniversary

Photo courtesy of Karuna Sevena.

This year has seen the dedication of two Bhikkhuni monastery projects in the west, while another is taking momentous steps forward. This is especially momentus as the Global Bhikkhuni Sangha celebrates its 2,600th anniversary between the full moon of September 2016 and the full moon of September 2017. To read more on the Bhikkhuni Sangha please read Ven. Ayya Tathaaloka's article from BuddhistDoor Global here.

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May the Dhamma flourish!

In Memory of Zenkei Blanche Hartman (1926-2016)

Zenkei Blanche Hartman from Boundless Life: A Chronicle Dedicated to Zenkei Blanche Hartman

Zenkei Blanche Hartman (1926-2016) was a Soto Zen teacher practicing in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki. From 1996 to 2002 she served two terms as co-abbess of the San Francisco Zen Center. She was the first woman to assume such a leadership position at the center. A member of the American Zen Teachers Association, Blanche was especially known for her expertise in the ancient ritual of sewing a kesa, called Nyoho-e, the practice of sewing Zen ceremonial robes in the lineage of Sawaki Kodo Roshi, which she had learned during the 1970s from Kasai Joshin Sensei, formerly of Antaiji. She taught this unique form of Zen practice to hundreds of students at the San Francisco Zen Center, and played an important role in establishing the practice in North America.

Lou and Blanche Wed from Boundless Life:
A Chronicle Dedicated to Zenkei Blanche Hartman

Born in Birmingham, Alabama to non-practicing Jewish parents in 1926. Blanche was educated in the Catholic school system in the early 1930s, but in 1943 her family moved to California, where her father served in the military. After taking up biochemistry and chemistry at the University of California she married Lou Hartman in 1947, giving birth to four children. In the late 1950s she found work as a chemist, though by 1968 she began questioning the direction of her life. She and her husband began sitting zazen regularly at the Berkeley Zen Center in Berkeley, California in 1969, and in 1972 the two entered Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. The couple lived at all of the other San Francisco Zen Center sites, including City Center and Green Gulch Farm. Shuun Lou Hartman passed away in 2011.

Gyalwang Karmapa Teaches on Bodhichitta & Discusses Bhikshuni Ordination Plans

His Holiness the Gyalwang Karmapa during the Third Arya Kshema Winter Dharma Gathering.

January 15, 2016 -Tergar Monastery, Bodh Gaya, Bihar India 

During the second day of the Third Arya Kshema Winter Dharma Gathering, the Gyalwang Karmapa continued his teaching on Gampopa’s Ornament of Precious Liberation, describing the causes for arousing bodhichitta. He also discussed the issue of the nun’s ordination, indicating that although he had hoped to initiate the process of giving Bhikshuni ordination this year, it had to be postponed for a variety of reasons.

The teaching today was focused on the four causes of arousing bodhichitta presented in the Levels of the Bodhisattva by Asanga. The first cause of arousing bodhichitta is seeing or hearing of the powers of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. The Karmapa explained that for this reason, studying the life stories of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas of the past is important.

The Shangpa Monlam in France 2014

Lama Palden Drolma

Kalu Rinpoche with his three year retreat grads who were in attendance

After driving through dense fog at 8 am, we arrived at Palden Shangpa La Boulaye, Kalu Rinpoche’s primary center in France. As the sun began to stream through the mist, a line of small stupas greeted us. Next we were welcomed by an impressive Bhutanese lhakhang (Tibetan for house of the gods – what they call temples). Before I could enter, I heard a voice say, “Kalu Rinpoche is calling you.” Turning around I saw Rinpoche striding towards me, and I hurried to greet him. After a warm embrace, he escorted me into the lhakhang to show off the altar he had arranged for the Monlam.

Rinpoche put his heart, time and love into this first ever Shangpa Monlam. A Monlam is a prayer, and a large Monlam like this one is where the lamas and attendees make many prayers for all beings’ benefit, which of course includes praying that all beings receive what they need and desire and live in harmony and peace. He had placed nametags for the lamas of his centers and sat the senior lamas in a row together— from East and West, male and female, with all the other lamas and three year retreat grads in rows behind. All the other dharma practitioners sat on the sides and in back. The large lhakhang holds 500 people or so.

Women’s Contributions to Buddhism

Nona Sarana Olivia

Birth of the Buddha, Pakistan (Gandhara) second century A.D.

The Sati Journal is a publication of the Sati Center for Buddhist Studies. The center supports the study of Buddhist teachings with a perspective that balances scholarly inquiry with serious meditation practice. Believing that study and practice work together to deepen one’s practice and aid in awakening, the Sati Center's goal is to help participants explore original Buddhist texts and appreciate the richness of the tradition and lineage.

In the fall of 2011, I was delighted when Gil Fronsdal and Jeff Hardin asked me to be the guest editor for an issue devoted to women in Buddhism. Below is an excerpt from my introduction to this issue. In choosing writings, I decided to approach the topic of women in Buddhism through the lens of three overlapping themes: early Buddhist scholars, symbolic representations of gender, and inspiring contemporary leaders. This issue contains essays by Rita Gross, Noa Ronkin, Dawn Neal, Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, Ajahn Amaro, and Analayo Bhikkhu.

How We Show Up: Storytelling, Movement Building, and the First Noble Truth

Mushim Ikeda

The Community Engagement Project founded by Yemi Olu is trying to make a difference in the world by reaching out to people. Here they are collecting stories outside the Chinatown Metro in DC.

Photo by Victoria Pickering.

For me, there’s an often missing and crucial piece of the puzzle in socially engaged Buddhist dialogues, both in person and especially in online dialogues where we express our views. I’m feeling strongly these days that there’s a seemingly invisible suffering caused by linearity and disembodiedness in online activist forums, and I’m wondering what organizing strategies and movement-building methods can address this. How can we see, hear, and feel one another more clearly as we try to figure out how to set in motion systemic changes in complex, global systems of power and domination? How is it that we show up to and for one another when we express our views? Is there time and space and support for spirals of storytelling and sharing?

The Terror Within

Zenju Earthlyn Manuel

As a girl of ten years, satin ribbons in my hair, and wearing a freshly starched dress, I had a special seat in church each Sunday next to my father, Lawrence Manuel Jr. With my younger sister and mother on the other side, I sat close to him, appreciating our special relationship around the word of God. On Saturday evenings, in the rush of Los Angeles where I was born and raised, I would read my father his weekly Sunday school lesson. As I read, he would make symbols of his own in the margins that represented the sounds of the words. He did this because he was illiterate. A sharecropper's son born in 1898 in Opelousas, Louisiana, he spoke mostly Creole, making his English difficult to understand. Even though he couldn’t read, he didn’t let that get in the way of his participation in Sunday school. With the symbols he had developed, he would “read” a portion of each lesson out loud to a class of older black men. I would never have been brave enough to pull off such a thing. But my father was a talented and courageous man; raised in the backwoods, he learned to do whatever was necessary to survive. He was what I called “fearless,” and, as I sat next to him at church, I prayed to be fearless just like him.

Builder of Bridges: An Interview with Gloria Taraniya Ambrosia

Barre Center for Buddhist Studies

I'll start with an obvious question, Taraniya: How did you get into all this?
As far back as I can remember I was interested in what we now call the spiritual path. It took many forms in my early years, but I can tell you what led to my interest in Buddhism and how I first got exposed to it.

Throughout my twenties and early thirties, I had been interested in facilitating change through political, social, and economic systems. I wanted to work in fields that served people in a positive way. In my early thirties I even went back to school for a master’s degree in public administration and soon thereafter went to work for the governor’s science advisor in North Carolina. I had always been interested in science and technology, and this position offered a natural blend of science and public policy. Through this office and another agency, which was a spin-off of our office, I worked to promote biotechnology as a new technology for North Carolina.

Zen and the Real World

Kanja Odland Roshi

No one can guarantee anything when it comes to Zen practice. Well, I can almost guarantee that if you do zazen (the meditation that is the foundation of Zen), you will get pain in the legs sometimes and it’s quite likely that you will feel tired when you do it in the early mornings; that you will have moments of discouragement and moments of ease and joy. There are many things that are quite probable, but luckily, there is nothing that is certain other than this: if it is a practice that resonates with you, in doing it you cannot escape and your mind seeks unification with everything else. Your whole being moves into the territory of non-separation, and there’s an absolute attraction towards experiencing reality as it is. To quote the cybernetic race in Star Trek called the Borg, "Resistance is futile; you will be assimilated." Some people say that the whole idea of “oneness” is either a romantic New Age idea or something that is so natural that we don’t need to do anything other than just be.

Isn’t it better to use the time doing something that produces useful results in the real world instead of wasting time in meditation? "Go and help people in the real world," some people might say. Or, "Don’t just sit there

—do something!" But in Zen we find a different approach. My first Zen teacher, Philip Kapleau, had a baseball cap that said, "Don’t just do something—sit there!"

The Business Beneath the Patch Robe

by Ryūmon Hilda Gutiérrez Baldoquín Sensei

Today I went on an early afternoon walk on a road called Cemetery. It’s a not a very long road—a quarter of a mile long. If you are heading north, it veers to the right, downhill off South Road, the main road cutting through the center of town. Cemetery then comes to an end and meets South Road, from which it veered, once again, four-tenths of a mile up, like an outward-curved parenthesis, or a smile. In this small and very rural New England town—no street lights, no post office, one of eighteen dry towns in the Commonwealth—where I have lived for the past four years, it is common to find roads like this.

The town is a “right-to-farm community and there is a right-to-farm bylaw in effect,” says the notice from the town’s Collector of Taxes. I never thought myself a farmer, coming from a lineage of maids, bread makers, cooks, union factory workers, construction laborers, gas station attendants, corner store owners, seamstresses, and beauticians. Yet, living here I experience a deep joy and contentment that the three vegetable beds, six by three feet, and the small herb garden my partner and I put in each spring is part of a greater constellation of human beings who have honored, cared for, and worked the earth going back thousands of years, not just an urban fad.

Mindful Eating: Five Ways to Develop a Skillful Relationship with Food

by Jan Chozen Bays

"The Buddha taught one thing, and one thing only: suffering and the end of suffering.” I heard Maha Gosananda repeat this phrase over and over to a gathering of Western Buddhist teachers. How ironic that in America, land of plenty, so many people struggle with food, suffering tremendous emotional distress, guilt, shame, and even premature death. Does Buddhism have anything to offer to relieve this kind of suffering? The facts are startling. Doctors predict that children born in the year 2000 have a 30 to 40 percent risk of Type 2 diabetes and may live shorter lives than their parents as a result.

Uncovering the Lamp

by Harsha Menon

Book review of Wisdom Publication’s The Hidden Lamp: Stories from Twenty-Five Centuries of Awakened Women (scheduled to be released by Wisdom Publications November 12, 2013), compiled and edited by Zenshin Florence Caplow and Reigetsu Susan Moon.

The upcoming publication of The Hidden Lamp could be said to be a before-and-after moment of female representation in Buddhist literature. This unparalleled volume of one hundred koans featuring women, with additional reflections by present-day female Buddhist teachers is an incredibly well-researched, original, and heartful offering to not just Buddhists, but to spiritual seekers everywhere.

The Hidden Lamp’s diverse collection of contributors ranges from priests and teachers, not just from Zen lineages, but from across the full spectrum of Buddhism. The contributors are professors, authors, monastics, scholars, teachers, anthropologists, activists, attorneys, physicians, librarians, poets, artists, filmmakers, midwives, and therapists. By compiling 100 koans and other stories (the words koan and story are used interchangeably in The Hidden Lamp) of the Buddhist female experience, editors Caplow and Moon create a text that penetrates intentionally, the same way a koan has been traditionally employed in Zen Buddhist practice.

Women and Buddhism: Are Women Good for Religion?

by Joan Halifax, PhD, founding abbot, Upaya Zen Center

IWP: BEST project in Thailand

Since the mid-sixties, I have practiced Buddhism. From my point of view, Buddhism is more of a philosophy and, as well, a method to train the mind and heart. At its base, there should be no gender bias in Buddhism, if we examine Buddhism’s basic tenets. But in fact there is, as we learn that female monastics observing the full nun’s Patimokkha (311 rules), or precept body (the Vinaya), are subject to eight precepts that favor their brother monks, precepts that imply nuns are less worthy than individuals of the opposite sex. These are called “the eight heavy rules” and were reputedly crafted by the Buddha, who resisted ordaining women until he was persuaded otherwise by his cousin Ananda and the power of the presence of his stepmother and her women associates.

Liberation in the Midst of Suffering

by Ryūmon Hilda Gutierrez Baldoquín Sensei

"Taj Mohammad, center, borrowed money to pay for hospital treatment for his wife
and medical care for some of his children." Bryan Denton for The New York Times

Recently two articles leading with pause-moment headlines landed in my inbox within twenty-four hours of each other. The first one in the Atlantic reminds me “How Racism is Bad for Our Bodies” and the second one, in the Huffington Post, reminds me “Buddhist ‘People Of Color Sanghas,’ Diversity Efforts Address Conflict About Race Among Meditators.”