15th Sakyadhita International Conference on Buddhist Women

80th Birthday Celebration: Ven. Pema Chodron

Today we celebrate the birthday of one of Sakyadhita International's co-founders, Ven. Pema Chodron who was born Diedre Blomfield in 1936 in New York City. She grew up in a Catholic family in New Jersey, earned a master's in education from the University of California, Berkeley and taught elementary school in California and New Mexico. In 1972, after 2 marriages and 2 children, she discovered Tibetan Buddhism. From 1974 until his death in 1987, Ven. Pema studied under Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, founder of the Shambhala school of Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism. In 1981, at the age of 45, Ven. Pema became the first American in the vajrayana tradition to become a fully ordained Bhikshuni. 

We invite you to celebrate Ven. Pema's 80th birthday with an article that first appeared in Shambhala Sun (Sept '98), republished here with the gracious permission of Lion's Roar.

Ven. Pema Chodron, a co-founder of Sakyadhita International Association of Buddhist Women,
at the 1st Sakyadhita International Conference held on Bodhgaya, India in 1987.
Pictured top row, 2nd from right.

Announcement: Sakyadhita E-Book Now Available

 

The Compassion and Social Justice E-Book is now available online as both a PDF and a Bookmarked PDF. Please visit our Sakyadhita Publications Page to view our E-Publications, as well as available print publications and conference materials.

Additionally, Buddhist Women in A Global Multicultural Community is also available as an e-book.

Announcement: Sakyadhita International 2014 Newsletter Now Available

Call for Submissions: 2015 Sakyadhita International Newsletter

We are now accepting submissions for the 2015 Sakyadhita International Newsletter. If you have stories, artwork, interviews, or other items you feel may be beneficial for our annual publication please share it with us.

Please review past issues of the Sakyadhita International Newsletter and email Danie with submissions or questions.

If we cannot use a piece for the newsletter we may have other options available, such as this blog, so please do not hesitate to reach out to us with your submissions.

Impressions from the 2015 Sakyadhita International Conference

They came in robes and in street clothes, with perfectly coiffed hair and with shaved heads, in sandals, in boots, and in high heels. They came from all over the world, on wings, on wheels, by foot. They came, the Buddhists, the Muslims, the Hindus, and the Christians, and some who have set aside all religion. They came, over 1,000 of them, in search of inspiration. And that is what they found.

The 2015 Sakyadhita Conference is the first I have attended, though it has been offered for nearly 30 years now. Organized by an ordained woman who practices Tibetan Buddhism and teaches at the University of California in San Diego, the Venerable Karma Lekshe Tsomo, this conference for Buddhist women was centered on the theme of compassion and social justice. It is supported by Venerable Lekshe, other nuns and monks, and dozens of women and men volunteers who gain nothing but the satisfaction of knowing that they have helped so many.

What Would I Do for the Dharma? Thinking about Ryonen

Susan Moon

Image 1: Calligraphy
by Ryonen Genso

Ryonen was a woman Zen teacher in 17th century Japan. A story about her has been cooking inside of me ever since I read it some years ago.

As a young woman, Ryonen 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 went in search of a Zen master with whom she could practice.

She traveled to the monastery of Master Hakuo Dotai, who refused her because of her beauty, saying her womanly appearance would cause problems for the monks in his monastery.

Afterward, she saw some women pressing fabric by a river, 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.
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 became abbess of his temple when he died, and later founded her own temple. Before her death she wrote the following poem:

This is the sixty-sixth 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.

History of Women in Buddhism - Indonesia: Part 9

Tomé Pires Witness & the Beguines, 

change comes to the roles of women in religion in Indonesia

Ayyā Tathālokā Bhikkhunī

In this ninth post in our “History of Women in Buddhism - Indonesia” series leading up to the Sakyadhita International Buddhist Women’s Conference in Indonesia, we come to the last of the ancient and premodern records of Buddhist women leaders, kilis and bhikkhunīs in Indonesian Buddhism, with one final and telling glimpse from a surprising Western source, before sweeping social changes overtook Java, Sumatra and much of the archipelago. We touch on some of the changes brought by Islam and by Colonialism, and the impact they had on women in Indonesian religion and spirituality, and women in Buddhism.

Extracted from Ayyā Tathālokā’s paper “Light of the Kilis: Our Indonesian Bhikkhuni Ancestors,” this article is part of the series leading up to the 14th Sakyadhita Conference in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. This article is dedicated to the first Theravada bhikkhunī ordination in contemporary times in Indonesia which is planned to precede the Sakyadhita Conference in June 2015. 

History of Women in Buddhism - Indonesia: Part 8

Gāyatrī Rājapatni: Queen, Bhikkhunī & the Prajñāpāramitā

Ayyā Tathālokā Bhikkhunī[1]

In this eighth post in our “History of Women in Buddhism - Indonesia” series leading up to the Sakyadhita International Buddhist Women’s Conference in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, we explore the life of one of Indonesia’s most interesting historical Buddhist women.  Earlier prominent women leaders and women ascetics/monastics/nuns that we’ve portrayed in this series such as Ken Dedes, Bhrikuti, Devi Kilisuci, Ratu Shima and Manimekhalai have been interesting in enigma--they are fascinating in that we catch such brief glimpses of their lives, leaving so much to be filled in by imagination, as we find in the many Indonesian, Indian and Tibetan legends, operas and ballets through which their lives are popularly remembered. In this post however, we have the benefit of a lengthy and highly-descriptive historical documentary poem written by a co-contemporary Buddhist monastic poet/biographer/documenteur passed down to us intact, and at least one very well-preserved mortuary portrait image, the Prajñāpāramitā.  Of further interest in addendum is the role that this image has come to play in the contemporary re-nascence of the Theravada Bhikkhunī Sangha on the other side of the world, in North America.

Extracted from Ayyā Tathālokā’s paper “Light of the Kilis: Our Indonesian Bhikkhuni Ancestors,” this article is part of the series leading up to the 14th Sakyadhita Conference in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.  This post coincides with the release of the first English-language edition of Earl Drake’s Gayatri Rajapatni: The Woman Behind the Glory of Majapahit by Areca Books.

Gāyatrī Rājapatni: Queen, Bhikkhunī & the Prajñāpāramitā

Image 1: Prajñāpāramitā image from East Java
at the National Museum of Indonesia, Jakarta

We will now meet one of the greatest of those women whose life has been passed down to us in memory, posthumously captured by the Buddhist monk poet of the court who knew and wrote of her with such reverence and appreciation.  This woman is the lady Gāyatrī, also known as the Rājapatni, in a way somewhat similar to and reminiscent of the lady Gotamī, also known as the Great Prajāpatī.[2]

Gāyatrī was a devout Buddhist, and the youngest daughter of the founder of Majapahit, the last of the great Indonesian royal dynasties, known as the Rajasa Dynasty.  She had three elder siblings, and together they were known as The Four Princesses of Singasari (Singosari).  The epics remember Gāyatrī as having been a keen student of literature, and political, social and religious matters. She possessed extraordinary beauty, charm, wisdom and intelligence.  And yet, in 1276 CE, at the tender age of sixteen, in a terrible repeat of what happened to Airlangga two hundred years earlier {in Post 5}, her world went mad. She witnessed the destruction of her home and kingdom and the murder of her father under the unsuspected attack of the Duke of Kederi.

14th Sakyadhita International Conference on Buddhist Women

Register for the 14th Sakyadhita International Conference on Buddhist Women here.

No Longer MIA in History

by Munissara Bhikkhuni

Recently I was reading a report on the activities of a monks’ monastery in the local Buddhist group´s newsletter. I knew that the monks, especially the abbot, had been very kind and allowed a Buddhist nun to stay at the limited women´s quarters in the monastery to do a three-month retreat during the traditional rainy season retreat period. I was therefore expecting that the nun would be included in the report’s description of the community that spent the rains retreat and was surprised to find it made no mention of her at all. It enumerated only monks, postulants training to be monks, and laypeople.

Why Sakyadhita is Important: A look at Buddhist women's experience from the Therigatha and today

by Sarana Nona Olivia

Female monastics and Buddhist laywomen listen to His Holiness the Karmapa
at the 13th International Sakyadhita Conference, January 2013.

With a desire to translate the Therigatha and a small grant from Naropa, I spent part of summer 2000 at the Barre Center, learning Pali. Lucky for me, Pali is a close cognate to ancient Greek so with Andy generously answering questions and Mu Seong and Sumi making me feel at home, I was able to complete the 522 stanzas, or some 72 poems. Included in the Khuddaka Nikaya, the Therigatha is said to be verses composed by the first bhikkhunis, contemporaneous to the historical Buddha. Having been trained as a classicist and always looking for extant material composed by women, I was drawn to the Therigatha partly because it is among the oldest texts attributed to women and also because I wanted to see how it could be used as a teaching text. Clearly, since it had been preserved, it must have had a purpose.

Auspicious Beginnings: The Inception of Sakyadhita

Female monastics and laypeople at the 12th International Sakyadhita Conference
held in Bangkok, Thailand in 2011

by Karma Lekshe Tsomo

 

Until 1987 most Buddhist women lived isolated lives in their own communities, without even meeting Buddhists of other traditions. The 300 million Buddhist women in the world constituted a significant silent majority. If the uncounted millions of Buddhist women in China and North Korea are added to that figure, this silent majority becomes even more significant. One big change in the last 20 years is that Buddhist women are no longer isolated. The electronic revolution has made organizing women much easier than before. Since 1987 Sakyadhita has put new technologies to work to ensure that Buddhist women can no longer be ignored.