Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America, Set

WOMEN AND ZEN BUDDHISMS: JAPANESE, CHINESE, KOREAN, AND VIETNAMESE

WOMEN AND ZEN BUDDHISMS l 639 yssey of Henry Steel Olcott (1996); and Thomas Tweed, The American Encounter with Buddhism 1844–1912: Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent (1992). For a description of the World’s Parliament of Religions, see Richard Hughes Seager, The World’s Parliament of Religions: The East-West Encounter, Chicago 1893 (1995). WOMEN AND ZEN BUDDHISMS: JAPANESE, CHINESE, KOREAN, AND VIETNAMESE Miriam Levering and Grace Jill Schireson ZEN, AN ASIAN Buddhist tradition that first came to the West from Japan, emphasizes meditation and intensive self-examination as a way to wisdom, compassion, self-knowledge, and freedom from self-concern. In North America groups of Zen practitioners embody and reshape Japanese (Zen), Chinese (Ch’an), Vietnamese (Thien), and Korean (Son) Zen traditions. In the nearly 100 years since its introduction, Zen in North America has become truly North American, as this Asian contemplative and monastic tradition has established itself as a lay-centered movement. North American Zen is more active, individualistic, egalitarian and engaged, media friendly, synthetic, and universalistic than its Asian counterparts (McKinney, 1). Recently the sexual revolution, increases in higher education for women, the women’s liberation movement, and middle-class women’s growing economic independence gradually have created a culture in the United States and Canada in which middle- and upper-class women lead publicly and expect their concerns to be addressed. In Asian cultures , women have always supported Zen, but only exceptional women have received the most rigorous monastic training. One major change that has occurred as Zen adapts to North American conditions is that wherever whites are in the majority, women have come to play a greater role. Largely white Zen communities are the only ones that have been studied, so the role of women in those communities is the focus of this essay. In those communities, wherever new leadership has developed following the death of the Asian founder, women teachers have taken on public roles. Typically, Japanese- and Korean-derived Zen groups in North America have “Zen centers” in large cities, training monasteries or retreat centers in the countryside , and smaller affiliated “sitting groups” in smaller communities. In 2000 there were approximately 2,000 centers. Zen centers are headed by a teacher certified to give dharma transmission or teaching authority to students . The community of a Zen center is those who carry out daily liturgies of worship, periodic special ceremonies honoring Buddhas (fully awakened ones) and bodhisattvas (powerful saints who are close to becoming Buddhas), and twice-daily practice of seated meditation. Members also participate in periodic longer practice sessions (sesshins), commonly lasting seven days, and follow the basic moral and behavioral precepts of Mahayana Buddhism, the form of Buddhism dominant in East Asia. In some Zen traditions, students try to embody the meaning of koans, stories about the enigmatic sayings and doings of earlier masters. An example is the famous dialogue in which a monk asked the teacher Joshu , “Does a dog have the Buddha-nature?” Mahayana Buddhism teaches that all sentient beings have the Buddha-nature, a fact the questioning monk surely knew. Joshu replied, “No!” Students today are asked to understand what Joshu meant by that “No!” and to demonstrate that meaning, often nonverbally. Most members of Zen centers in North America are married; many are supported by jobs in the larger society and some by center-created cottage industries. Spiritual authority rests in the teacher or teachers, and institutional authority in a board of directors. Holders of monastic offices assist the teacher in training students. Advanced students take ordinations as priests. Priests can perform ceremonies such as daily offices, weddings, and funerals. Often they can teach students under the supervision of a fully certified teacher but cannot grant teaching authority to students of their own without dharma transmission . Obtaining dharma transmission often takes many years. On attaining dharma transmission, former students often start their own sitting groups and aspire to build or inherit the leadership of Zen centers. As one can see from this description, authority is acquired not from an institution but from a single senior person who chooses one to “inherit his (or her) dharma.” As in Asia, father-to-son transmission as part of a long genealogical lineage going back to the Buddha as the original ancestor remains the central metaphor for the foundational structure of authority. At Zen centers teachers are supported by dues and donations but also by producing books and workshops for persons beyond the...