Dharma Rain Zen Center - Stillpoint

In Support of a Women’s Lineage

by Domyo Burk

In Zen, the face-to-face transmission of the teaching from human being to human being, teacher to student, is sacred.

There are two primary reasons for this. First, we celebrate the gift of the Dharma that allows us to transform our lives. Second, we emphasize that the essential matter is a personal experience that must be lived and manifested, not merely learned from books or verbal teachings. We cannot give someone a written test, or even ask them to demonstrate physical practices, to determine whether they have a personal knowledge of essential Dharma. Rather, a teacher recognizes at an intuitive level that a student has experienced what the teacher has experienced. We say “Buddha recognizes Buddha” in the sympathetic resonance of shared experience. There is also a mystical aspect to this shared recognition, as the student’s very ability to recognize Buddha is an important part of it.

Our Zen lineage is a list of names reflecting the transmission from teacher to student, from Shakyamuni Buddha all the way down through the generations to our own teachers. There are a number of places in the lineage, especially early on, where the connections are acknowledged by modern scholars and practitioners to be mythical rather than literal. However, a few holes in the historical record does not diminish the symbolic power of the lineage.
Because of this important aspect of lineage, there has been some controversy over the lists of historical Buddhist women practitioners, compiled by modern women, sometimes called a “lineage.” These lists have been an effort on the part of living Zen women to know and celebrate the many women who have practiced throughout the ages but who do not appear on the lineage lists, either because they were not able, or allowed, to establish lineages or because their names were simply excluded from the historical record. Most people agree that it is regrettable that Buddhist lineages included exclusively men’s names for thousands of years, with women’s names appearing only in the last generation or two. However, can you call these cobbled-together lists of women “lineages” without compromising the important meaning of that term in Zen?

When I first encountered the lists of historical women practitioners, I thought it might be better to call them a list or a line. I also wanted men to acknowledge the importance of these women, so I didn’t want to call the lists a “women’s” lineage or line. I proposed a compromise which still appears in our Zen Center’s chant book: “The Line of Women Dharma Ancestors.”

Having received the first part of my priestly transmission, however, I feel very differently. I passionately feel that these lists of women, though less historically accurate than the lists of men, are every bit as important to me as a lineage, if not more so. I also believe this is a women’s lineage. I don’t expect men to feel as I do.

When a student finally becomes able to recognize Buddha in her teacher and in herself, this is an incredibly important step. It is perhaps one of the most difficult steps for human beings to take. It requires great courage. It requires letting go of all of our previous ideas. It requires, ironically, a certain form of self-esteem.

The need for this self-esteem is emphasized very early in Buddhism, perhaps the first time in the Lotus Sutra. A number of parables deal with self-esteem, but the best known is the story of the Lost Son. A rich man’s young son wanders away from home. The son spends decades living a desperate and irresolute life in foreign lands and forgets who he is. Eventually he wanders back home but does not recognize home, or his father. The father recognizes the son, however, and is overjoyed to see him. When the father reaches out, the son assumes that this rich and powerful man is just going to harass or imprison him, so he runs away. What follows is many years of the father gradually employing and promoting his son — first as a menial field worker (work the son can accept), and finally as his primary assistant — until the son regains a sense of pride and confidence. As he is dying, the rich father publicly acknowledges his son, at which point the son is ready for his inheritance.

Our Buddha-nature is our inheritance, but recognizing it in ourselves is not easy. We need time, hard work, and lots of gentle encouragement and teaching. If it were not for my women’s lineage, I might not have had the opportunity to practice the Dharma at all, and I certainly would have found it difficult — if not impossible — to claim my inheritance, my Buddha-nature. The women in my lineage kept alive the reality that women, too, can practice; that women, too, can attain liberation, awakening and wisdom. Did every woman in the lineage meet the woman whose name appears before hers on the list? No. But did every women hear about, know about — at least in some general way — and gain strength from the woman who came before her? Absolutely. Imagine some Chinese nun requesting full-strength Dharma and training from a male teacher in a male monastery. Imagine her meeting her teacher in Dharma combat to hone and manifest her awakening. How many women would have the thought, let alone the courage, to do such a thing if she had not heard of some audacious woman 50 years earlier, in another province, who had dared to do the same? If she had not heard whispers about Mahapajapati? We women notice the slightest mention of such a thing, and do not forget.

The flame of the Dharma lamp of transmission was not passed directly from woman to woman; that lineage of men was essential to me as well. The women’s lineage cannot stand on its own, but neither can the lineage of men; all things are interdependent. For me, this truth only increases the gratitude.