25

Still Work to Be Done: Women in Western Buddhism

GRACE SCHIRESON      RITA GROSS

CHRISTINA FELDMAN      LAMA PALDEN DROLMA

 

When you look at the way things are today for Buddhist women in the West, would you say there’s cause for celebration or for dismay?

GRACE SCHIRESON: We do have cause for celebration, but that doesn’t mean all our work is done. The fact that things are moving in a positive direction for women doesn’t mean there aren’t any more problems.

RITA GROSS: There have been a lot of strides for women in the thirty years or so that I’ve been involved in Buddhism. The important question for me has always been, are there women teachers? There are now a lot more women teaching Buddhism in the West, though in the Tibetan system we’re all pretty much teaching under the guidance of a Tibetan and not teaching independently.

There’s been a lot of improvement in liturgies in terms of gender-inclusive and gender-neutral language, but it’s still not always the case. It’s a big stride that people no longer say, “Oh, that’s not an issue. We don’t need to talk about it.” But the younger generation sometimes frightens me. Very recently I was at a retreat and one of the young residents said, “Oh, I don’t agree with that at all. That’s just genderizing the Dharma. There are no problems.”

That’s the perpetual issue we face: women make some gains and then people forget how things used to be. It’s frightening to think of the up-and-coming generation of meditators rejecting the work of feminists as genderizing the Dharma. To that, I always reply, “We’re not genderizing the Dharma. We’re ungenderizing it.” The Dharma was genderized thousands of years ago when women were first put in a separate class.

CHRISTINA FELDMAN: There have been really great changes since I began teaching in 1975. In the Theravāda tradition at that time there were almost no women teachers and the imprint was still very much a monastic model and lineage. Now we have a wonderful group of senior women teachers and no one is surprised to see them sitting on the stage or standing at the podium. That in itself is quite a turnaround.

With young women, I often find that all they’ve known is gender equality. Most have never been to Asia, so they haven’t seen how hard it is for women practicing there. Their feeling is that the work is done. But there is a long way to go in the Theravāda tradition in terms of gender equality, particularly in the monastic community, and this issue is a hot potato between the lay and monastic communities. Still, I feel heartened by the changes over the last thirty years.

LAMA PALDEN DROLMA: One of the optimistic things in the Vajrayāna tradition that I experienced from the beginning was that the very high masters just threw out some of the old stuff. For example, there were Mahakala rooms at the monastery where women weren’t supposed to go. They just said, “Oh no, that’s fine, you can come in,” and they let us live in the monasteries and study.

But there’s quite a difference between the high rinpoches, who have a lot of realization and from the beginning have treated women with respect and equality, and what I think of as the “middle management lamas,” who aren’t as realized and are more culturally bound, as well as the monks who live in Asian monasteries and haven’t had much contact with the West. But even male Western lamas often aren’t treated well by Asian monks, so it goes beyond a gender issue into a Western–Asian issue.

However, in general things have come along quite well, and many of the Tibetan teachers have made an effort to ask women to teach. Yet I know a lot of women who are authorized to teach but don’t because the situation is intimidating or they haven’t had enough practical support.

In the Tibetan tradition, where you have rinpoches and tulkus, it seems harder for women to get a foothold as senior teachers.

LAMA PALDEN DROLMA: I’m not so sure. I’ve received nothing but support to move forward, but the level of realization is the major factor, and we in the West don’t yet have the levels of realization of people such as the late Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, or the Karmapa, or the Dalai Lama.

RITA GROSS: Given that 99.9 percent of the people picked as tulkus and trained from an early age are boys, I think it is difficult for women to become senior teachers, and I’m not talking about Westerners, I’m talking about Tibetans.

CHRISTINA FELDMAN: In the Theravāda tradition in the West there hasn’t been nearly as much interface between monastics and lay teachers, so lay teachers haven’t been shackled by the monastic tradition. Lay teachers and centers have set off on their own journey, so to speak, without needing authorization from the monastic community.

What are the main areas where women are still stuck—where they don’t have equal opportunity or support?

LAMA PALDEN DROLMA: None of the gains we’ve made in the West are necessarily touching monks who’ve been educated in monasteries in Asia. So that’s one area that’s kind of stuck. As Christina was saying, Insight Meditation Society, Spirit Rock, and Gaia House have separated themselves to some extent from the old-country tradition and just moved forward on their own. But in the Tibetan tradition, the situation has been much more mixed.

Also, among certain women there’s still strong adherence to the patriarchy, in the sense of wanting to be daddy’s good girl. Some male teachers who’ve authorized women really have authorized them to be independent and supported them. But in other cases, women teachers are still expected to be under a male teacher and to behave in certain ways and do it the way daddy wants you to do it. Women need to be educated about the attitudes our male teachers have, and we need to examine how male-identified we are, or how intimidated we are, and we need discernment in terms of who we want to study with or work with.

Sexuality is another area where women have given away their power or men have power tripped them. For there to be equality, women need be educated that they don’t have to sleep with a male teacher just because that teacher wants them to. We don’t need to give away our power in terms of our sexuality. This is still very much a sore spot for many teachers and students.

GRACE SCHIRESON: The trainings that have been passed on to us have to do with training young men. When young men come into a monastic situation, because of the way their ego defenses work, they need to learn to harmonize and fit in to the community and not to dominate with that sort of raw, intentional energy that young men have. But women, as Palden said, hide behind their ego defenses in different ways. They hide by pleasing others and ingratiating others, and so their training needs to be different. I don’t think this has been specifically acknowledged and worked on as much as it can be.

This fits with the whole issue of women’s sexuality as pleasers—not taking our position as primary people but coming into our position through ingratiating, pleasing, seducing, or attracting others. This is an ego habit for many women, more so than it is for men. Men take their position differently, and I know in my Zen tradition it works on that kind of samurai spirit. Zen hasn’t developed the teachings to help women come forward as women.

This is one of the shadow sides of Western Buddhism’s intersection with the Asian tradition. In our own culture, Westerner to Westerner, we might recognize more readily the inappropriateness of certain relationships. But because of the cultural overlay, people can be fooled and not see a sexual relationship between a teacher and student as an ethical breach. They think that somehow it’s the roshi’s right or entitlement to have these kinds of relationships.

CHRISTINA FELDMAN: In lay Theravāda centers in the United States, and in the centers where I teach, it’s always shared trainings of teachers, rather than one person handing on a lineage to another. There’s a training program that includes plenty of sustained practice, study, and so on, and that’s led by a mix of male and female senior teachers.

There have been a few ethical breaches, which is why the teacher code of ethics is strongly enforced and well known. We publicize it in all our centers. It’s on the walls, so it’s clear from the outset that a sexual relationship between a teacher and student is a no-go. It doesn’t mean there haven’t been lapses, but they’ve been addressed—sometimes very painfully, but they have been addressed.

RITA GROSS: From what I know of Western Buddhism and the Tibetan tradition, there are plenty of male teachers—not necessarily highly authorized teachers, but teachers who have some authorization—who are perfectly eager and willing to sleep with female students.

GRACE SCHIRESON: Still, this is not only a male problem; this is a woman’s problem as well. Women need to learn not to be confused by the exotic or foreign or new nature of Buddhist practice, and to understand what their tendencies are. We will not solve this problem if we just focus on the male side of it.

RITA GROSS: I completely agree. Women need to learn how to know what they want and how to take control of their lives.

Another area where we are still stuck, I think, is that when we look at who’s teaching in the West, about half of the people teaching at some level of authorization are women. But when you look at the popular teachers or the ones who are frequently leading retreats, especially in the Tibetan tradition and to some extent also in Zen, they are about 80 to 90 percent men. I once did a survey of several issues of the Shambhala Sun and Buddhadharma in which I counted the ads for retreats, and it came up astonishingly high for male teachers.

In the Tibetan tradition, it’s still much more difficult for women than men to be senior-ranked teachers, more so than in the other traditions. It seems to me that one of the key problems is that Vajrayāna is still pretty much controlled by Tibetans. I don’t know how to work with that. It’s a difficult issue.

GRACE SCHIRESON: Even in the Zen tradition, where women have equal empowerments, there isn’t equality in terms of leading large training monasteries and institutions. Women tend to have the smaller places.

In my tradition, the Zen master is associated with the strong, silent type, and we don’t have an image of how women inhabit the role of leader. I hear senior women questioning whether any of the women are as excellent as the men, because their image of a leader is the strong, silent male. The other thing that I’ve heard many women teachers talk about is the lack of support of women by women. I think it’s a big issue, and it has been an issue for nuns from the very beginning. Women tend to gravitate to male leadership rather than support other women. The women teachers I’ve talked to about this say they find this very painful—more painful than men not supporting them.

RITA GROSS: This is one of the areas of gender where we’re stuck—women by and large tend to think men are better teachers. There’s that lingering inferiority that’s so hard to overcome.

LAMA PALDEN DROLMA: I notice as a woman teacher that most men will only go to male teachers. For example in my center, it’s completely open and we have some great men who come, but it’s 80 percent women.

I recently read several accounts from women who attended the bhikkhunī ordinations in California and their stories were heartening. It seemed that women were very supportive of the women who took bhikkhunī ordination. Christina, do you feel that women are now supporting other women who want to become either bhikkhunīs or senior teachers?

CHRISTINA FELDMAN: In the Theravāda tradition, we’ve sorely felt the lack of ordained bhikkhunīs. Now that these ordinations are happening, women are greeting them with tremendous support and delight and celebration.

Also, I started teaching women’s retreats twenty-five years ago, and a community of women has built up who feel strong in their practice and in their lineage, and who only practice with other women. There’s something about having retreats led by women that models a kind of strength and uprightness.

GRACE SCHIRESON: I’ve also supported women’s retreats for a long time, as part of a team of women teachers. When women see other women teach, one of the things they begin to awaken to is that they do prefer men. As a psychologist, I think there’s something about daddy’s distance—in other words, children grow up taking mother for granted. It’s easy to push mom aside and glorify dad. I think women’s retreats help to awaken women to this tendency.

Regarding the reinstatement of the bhikkhunī order, I think women are enthusiastic and moved by it, but it remains to be seen whether they will move toward supporting these women teachers, or whether they’ll still prefer the traditional male patriarchs.

At what point is it more useful to step outside of existing Buddhist organizations and set up new ones based on leadership styles and models that are more supportive of women?

LAMA PALDEN DROLMA: I’ve certainly done that—my whole organizational model for Sukhasiddhi is different than the traditional male models. It’s a much more inclusive, collaborative, and loving model than some of the more samurai-style models from the past.

CHRISTINA FELDMAN: That has been an important part of the translation of the Dharma into the West—to find a model that addresses issues that have never been addressed in Asia, such as sexuality between teachers and students, and who gets enlightened and who doesn’t.

However, monastics are also modeling something very important. They’re modeling a kind of renunciation and simplicity and integrity, and it’s their responsibility to live up to that. I have reservations about abandoning any kind of interface with monastic communities. We would lose a lot by doing that because there is something very important being modeled there.

The other reservation I have about moving entirely away from cultural models from Asia is that there are a lot of women practitioners there who have never had the good fortune to be exposed to strong women or strong women teaching. They have never been taught that liberation is possible for them. I would find it uncomfortable to say, “You’ve got to do your own work,” and just leave them to their own devices. I feel accountable to a much larger Sangha of women than just Western women.

LAMA PALDEN DROLMA: I completely agree.

GRACE SCHIRESON: We are creating independent models, but at the same time we’re acting as a bridge, where we’re visible to a great number of people and where women will have the experience of seeing us stand up. When I practiced in Japan in an all-male monastery, I would go to the lectures and 80 to 90 percent of those who came to hear the teacher speak were Japanese women. They were so heartened to see me as a woman practicing with the men, even though that wasn’t what they wanted to do.

It’s hard for me to stay involved in the larger training centers in the West, which are not usually led by women, because of the different standards and the lack of respect. But I try really hard to stay involved because I think my presence there will make a difference in the long run.

RITA GROSS: Looking at it as a scholar of religion, I’d say the whole Buddhist community needs both people who work within the standard conventional institutions and people who go outside of them.

I’ve always felt that if you can manage to stay within an institution, and change part of it from the inside, that’s very powerful. You really have an impact if you can stay within the institution and, for example, get a whole institution to retranslate its liturgy so that it’s more gender-neutral and gender-inclusive.

But there are many people who are not temperamentally able to take the flak of staying in a traditional patriarchal institution. For them, starting new institutions that present other models is also necessary for the overall progress of the Buddhist tradition. It’s often the institutions that radical that spur more conventional institutions to actually change from the inside.

How do you talk to young women Buddhists about these issues?

GRACE SCHIRESON: The point I make is that this isn’t something we’re making up. We’re not being grumpy feminists. We want to show them what has happened in the history of Buddhism—the fact that women’s names have been erased. We want to show them that there are parts of the scriptures that talk about women hatefully, and that women, because of the eight special rules, have been in a submissive position. It’s very important for women to see this, because it’s glossed over.

RITA GROSS: It’s very important that men see that, too.

GRACE SCHIRESON: And we don’t want to see it. We converted to Buddhism because we thought it was a superior practice and religion, and we don’t like seeing that it has the same flaws as other religions. We tend to want to idealize it. In Zen, there’s this idea that to call out gender is to somehow be attached to form and that we should stay on the emptiness side, the equality side, which is to ignore the Heart Sutra, which says form is emptiness, emptiness is form.

RITA GROSS: Yes, the men who say, “Let’s not talk about gender because gender isn’t real” don’t actually take that seriously at all. They don’t apply it to themselves.

GRACE SCHIRESON: No, they don’t go to the ladies’ room, they go to the men’s room.

RITA GROSS: It’s so comical and yet so tragic to see people who are very clear intellectually about emptiness but who still cling to gender markers. Somehow they can’t imagine gender arrangements being different than they are. It’s such a paradox.

CHRISTINA FELDMAN: It’s easy for timeless habits of aversion and fear to hide behind such spiritual generalizations. But it doesn’t actually address the reality of people’s lives. The Buddha taught that we can find liberation within this body, this gender, this form. So when I hear those kinds of statements, to me it doesn’t have any real meaning.

Yet it does seem to stop discussions short sometimes.

CHRISTINA FELDMAN: Only if we let it stop discussions short. Women also need to understand that disagreeing is not the same as being defensive; disagreeing can come from an educated place.

The question of ethics in this issue is huge. Gender discrimination is a violation of the ethical guidelines and boundaries. It is doing harm. I think in the Buddhist community, the investigation of what an ethical life looks like has to go beyond the training guidelines. It’s where we set in our minds a position that is higher. Gender inequality in Buddhism, or in any religion, is set on really shaky foundations, and I question how ethical they are.

LAMA PALDEN DROLMA: That’s why one of the fourteen root tantric vows is not to disparage women, even though that hasn’t necessarily stopped it.

GRACE SCHIRESON: This “not disparaging women” is complicated, because there’s a “not disparaging women” that means “don’t beat them up; as long as they stay in their place, let’s not be cruel to them.” But as soon as we start to speak up and say this isn’t quite right, the “B” word comes up. That can be very hard for women.

I teach women that the most important thing when speaking up on behalf of gender issues is not to come from a wounded place. You will not be able to make your case if you are feeling the pain and wound of this long history. You need to speak clearly and in the moment.

RITA GROSS: How we speak about gender issues is critically important, and if we are speaking out of emotional turmoil, we’re probably going to make the situation worse, not better. It’s important to go through whatever it takes to get to the point where we can speak clearly and calmly, and not defensively. However, it can be hard to get to the point where that’s possible.

LAMA PALDEN DROLMA: It’s more being centered and grounded, and, like Rita was saying, working through our emotional reactivity so we can be heard more clearly. We can also model how to rest in the realization of the emptiness of self, and be assertive and clear and step forward simultaneously.

RITA GROSS: For me, what it took was seeing that my violent, angry, emotional outbursts were polarizing the situation. They might have provided a temporary relief for me, but they weren’t doing anything to help anybody.

CHRISTINA FELDMAN: If women speak from a sense of need—needing approval or needing to belong—it’s never from a sense of sufficiency. The more that women find that sufficiency within their practice, within themselves, they’re not speaking from a place of need. Then there doesn’t need to be anger and there’s no need to be defensive, because sufficiency is not reliant upon approval or belonging or acceptance.

GRACE SCHIRESON: Still, even if we come from a place of sufficiency, and even if we’re grounded in the realization of selflessness while we’re being assertive, we’re likely to encounter some reactivity in our audience. You need to be prepared for that. You do need to be prepared when you speak up on these matters, because no matter how careful we are there’s going to be some reactivity or even an attack.

What hope do you see for resolving the issue of gender in Buddhism? Can you share some of your own inspiration?

LAMA PALDEN DROLMA: One thing I want to share is that high teachers are making corrections. For example, there were empowerments given in the Darjeeling area for a lot of Shangpa practitioners, my particular lineage. In the seating for the empowerments, the late Bokar Rinpoche put the non-Tibetan female lamas ahead of the male monastics. That was a big thing, and a statement to the monastic community. I think a lot of the rinpoches are seeing the inequality and wanting to remedy that—there’s the wish for women to come forward.

GRACE SCHIRESON: As Westerners become more confident in the practice and in standing on their own two feet, they’re willing to change things. To me this is the most encouraging point. For example, the ordination of bhikkhunīs was made possible because Westerners said, “We can change this. There’s been some mistake in not allowing this tradition to continue or to be revived.”

The same has been true in my tradition. The traditional chant that places us in the Buddhist family has no women’s names in it. We’ve created a new chant that includes our women ancestors and it has been approved by the national organization of teachers. This group is made up of men and women who are acknowledging the mistake and saying, “We have the confidence now to add documents to the ones we inherited in our lineage. We have the confidence to correct these mistakes.”

CHRISTINA FELDMAN: What is most inspiring to me is that I see around me a generation of sincere practitioners, women and men, who have actually reclaimed the possibility of awakening. I think this is one of the most extraordinary steps that this generation could ever have made.

RITA GROSS: One of the things I’ve changed in relating with these issues is that I’m no longer so interested in the outstanding role models like Yeshe Tsogyal, who would be very hard to emulate anyway. I’m interested in the notion that ordinary life is adequate for enlightenment. You don’t have to be unusual and exotic and one in a thousand. That’s not really the goal. The idea of just being oneself and becoming enlightened as one is has been a new take for me, and it is very refreshing. We really have everything we need, and all we need to do is work with that.