Winter Intensive: Women in Zen

Women in Zen: Breathing into What is Hidden
A Winter Intensive led by
Senior Students and Roshi Eve
January 17 - April 30

Talks on Tuesday nights will work with themes for the Intensive.

Women have been an integral part of Buddhism since its inception, and yet their experiences, perspectives and teachings have not been consistently recorded or valued. Currently in the West we have many women teachers, and we benefit from the scholarship of all those who translated the early stories and writings of women zen practitioners. This winter, as we breathe with the lives of women in Zen, we search for what remains hidden.

In this study we will explore how to come home more fully to ourselves despite the relegation, suppression and dismissal of what is “feminine.” How does the call to “leave home and go forth” bump up against cultural gender norms? Why did nuns scar themselves? In what ways does this manifest today? What is strength? What is power? What is beauty? What forms of desire are acceptable? Is caregiving a gendered calling or a manifestation of dharma? Are the questions raised by gender identification even consistent with the dharma, or is it all about self-clinging, as some believe? This study will illuminate ways we may disembody ourselves, and it will inspire the freedom to truly come home, free from self-clinging, manifesting everything we actually are.

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