Women in Buddhism - Elevating Our Voices | Planet Dharma Podcast

1. Women in Buddhism: Elevating Our Voices Welcome to Dharma if you Dare. I’m Christopher Lawley, Planet Dharma team member and producer of the podcast. In today’s talk, Catherine Pawasarat Sensei explores the topic of women in Buddhism. She talks about her early years as a feminist, becoming an attendant for her male teacher, shifting views in the Buddhist world around female rebirth, and elevating female tantric deities, among other subjects. I’m sure I’m not alone when I say I look forward to hearing more on this topic going forward. And for today, this talk is a great starting point for the conversation. Before we get to the recording, I wanted to let you know that Wisdom Publications has just published an interview with Catherine Sensei and Qapel on their Wisdom podcast. It’s a wide-ranging interview, the first half of which lays out a detailed account of the life of Namgyal Rinpoche. It’s a great synopsis of the legacy that this generation of the lineage is currently carrying forward. The second half of the interview explores the ways that Qapel and Sensei are honoring the Namgyal tradition of bringing the teachings to new frontiers. You can find a link to the episode in today’s show notes or look for episode number 128 of the wisdom podcast on your favorite podcast app. Being interviewed in the same year as teachers like the Dalai Lama and Robert Thurman is a real honor and I know Sensei and Qapel thoroughly enjoyed their conversation with Daniel Akin. And now here’s the recording. Sensei: I’d like to talk to you today about women and Buddhism. A lot of this is really related to my personal journey. This is a young field still and so in that sense, it’s an exciting time because this field is really being shaped as we speak and there is a lot of room for exploration and discovery in this field. I’d like to share with you a little bit about my journey and what I’ve found being a female practitioner in Buddhism. My perspective has been really heavily influenced. It’s essential to me that I lived in Japan for 20 years and part of that time I was really trying to go total immersion for part of that time, not all of it. I had mostly Japanese friends and I spoke Japanese all the time and there was a period of time where I dreamt in Japanese. I do speak and read

2. Japanese and so I have a good sense of at least an Asian perspective and to me, that’s really important when we talk about Buddhism. But let’s back up a little bit. So I grew up in the United States, I grew up in Kansas City. It’s kind of a wild cowboy town. Still I think people shoot from the hip as they say, still from that part of the country. And then I moved to New York City where I went to university at Columbia. I spent a lot of my young life identifying as a feminist. And my earliest feminist memories were singing, “I am woman, hear me roar” on the piano when I was about 10, I think, kind of singing at the top of my lungs and accusing my parents of being sexist because my sister and I, our chores was to set the table and do the dishes and my brother’s chores were to take out the garbage and I thought they were having a sexist division of labor in our chores. My parents said well that’s fine, you can take out the garbage too, we’re not Texas. So I had double duty, maybe my first lesson in learning to choose how I presented my arguments. I had a lot of male friends as a young woman in the States and I felt like that was an important part of who I was and in college, I felt like I spent a lot of my time educating my male friends –I’m not sure that’s the right word– but trying to share a female perspective with them. Read More Source URL: https://www.planetdharma.com/women-in-buddhism-elevating- our-voices/