This is an excerpt of “Forum: Hear Our Voices”, a conversation with Myokei Caine-Barrett, Narayan Helen Liebenson, Rebecca Li, and Myoan Grace Schireson about their experiences and insights into being a female teacher and leader, moderated by Pema Khandro Rinpoche. Fall Issue of Buddhadharma and in Lion’s Roar August 21, 2019. Read the full conversation here.
Pema Khandro Rinpoche: One question I’ve been excited to ask is this: what was the moment when you knew it was going to be your life’s work to be a Buddhist teacher?
Myoan Grace Schireson: I was at UC Berkeley in the sixties and I remember riding my motorcycle across the Bay Bridge to meet Suzuki Roshi. That encounter scared me to death. We were dressed in our hippie garb, and he said he knew why we were there—that we had come to learn how to get high. And he said, “The more you practice, the more you’ll realize that life is suffering.” I couldn’t get out of the building fast enough. Then, maybe a couple months later, I was saying goodbye to my boyfriend who lived in a psychedelic school bus. I was standing on the sidewalk barefoot when I looked up and noticed there was a convalescent hospital with people sitting on the porch in wheelchairs. And I said, “Oh, that’s what he meant.” I felt like the course of a river had shifted under my feet, that my whole life was changed in that moment. So that was when I knew the dharma had me; it owned me from then on. That was some fifty-two years ago.
Pema Khandro Rinpoche: I want to ask about female role models. I had one teacher, Ani Dawa—we called her Moma-la—who was ninety-four at the time I received teachings from her; she recently passed away. But meeting her was such a revision of how I saw myself and how I saw my life, because in her I saw this really powerful embodiment of realized energy as a woman. I wonder, are there particular women teachers or role models you’ve looked to in your life?
Myoan Grace Schireson: One was closer to me in status but still my senior sister, Saisho Maylee Scott, who started a community in Arcada. I remember thinking that it wouldn’t have been possible for me to stay at the Berkeley Zen Center without her. The other teacher I worked with quite closely was Blanche Hartman, and she was very motherly. Both Maylee and Blanche had children—Blanche had I think four, and Maylee had three—and I have two sons. The idea that we belonged in this community, that we belonged in the depth of the dharma as women with children was kind of new to us and also to the male teachers. When I was ordained, my teacher said that having a family was getting in the way. But Blanche had a kind of warmth that just made you feel cared for. She told a story about visiting a friend who had just had a baby: when Blanche saw the baby, she had to run out of the room, leaving her purse behind, because she already had four children and being around this baby made her want another one. She was very human and very feminine and very caring. That was wonderful.
Pema Khandro Rinpoche: I’m wondering, did any of you face any great external obstacles to being a teacher, some kind of resistance or difficulty that you experienced because you were a woman?
Myoan Grace Schireson: My teacher couldn’t see women—wives, mothers—becoming priests, even though my sons were in college or had finished college. He tried to convince me to become a lay teacher, something that they were just coming up with in the Zen world. So I said, “If I became a lay teacher, I wouldn’t have to shave my head, I wouldn’t have to go to Tassajara for a monastic practice period, and I wouldn’t have to give up my work. Is that what you’re saying?” He said, “Oh, I can’t believe you’ve opened your mind in such and such a way.” I told him I’d think about it. And then the next week when we met, I said, “I thought about it. I don’t want to do that.” That was the end of his pushing the lay teacher position on me. Later, when he did ordain me, he said, “I realized I was hung up on you being a wife and mother.”
Pema Khandro Rinpoche: I also get a lot of joy from sharing—sharing power, sharing authority, training other teachers, training people to take leadership in the sangha. I often say we’re a sangha of leaders, not followers, because I really believe that the idea of altruistic enlightened intent, or bodhicitta, empowers us to take responsibility for ourselves and our world. I try to train my sangha in that way.
Myoan Grace Schireson: I remember my teacher telling me to teach my sangha a specific thing—a hard thing—and my saying, “Well, I’m sure someone else can teach it.” But he insisted, “No, you need to do this.” I didn’t want to be disliked for being bossy and being an authority, and I thought, Oh shit, I have to do this. This is a problem. I’m going to have to be disliked. It’s still painful for me; people still dislike me when I have to stand up as the teacher. I don’t know any particular practice that magically makes it go away. It’s still uncomfortable.
Pema Khandro Rinpoche: I really resonate with that. For so long, I was a young female teacher and a tulku, which is someone enthroned as the reincarnation of a predecessor, and I didn’t quite fit in people’s boxes. People would often ask me, “Who’s the lama of your centers?” And I would say, “Well, I am.” I think it’s important to highlight what it’s like for women—or people who are underrepresented in these communities—to come into the role of the teacher. How can we make that into an opportunity and a practice? I don’t think it’s always an easy thing to do.
Myokei Caine-Barrett: From the sense of my intersectionality—being Black, Japanese, and a woman—it’s been very odd at times. My first rebellion in Japan was when all the women were serving tea, and I flat-out refused to do it unless the men of my same rank were required to do it as well. So they haven’t quite known what to do with me when I show up. My role models, in many instances, are some of the younger Japanese female priests who are now making steady strides toward being leaders in their temples. They’re doing things quietly, but it’s garnering a lot of attention.
Rebecca Li: You’re talking about resisting or not conforming to the gender norm given to us in a dharma community. It’s challenging, because we engage in the practice of cultivating humility, and you don’t want to be seen as saying, “Oh, this is below me.” But a lot of the “women’s work” is understood to be lesser, associated with a lesser status. As women dharma teachers, we have to juggle these in our minds.
Myoan Grace Schireson: I wanted to bring up one more obstacle, which is if you’re married and your husband is a practitioner. Wherever I went, people would assume that my husband was senior to me, that he was a teacher and I was the wifeykins. This caused a lot of tension in our marriage. It was hard for him, as a man, to acknowledge this kind of entitlement he was receiving. Even when we went to Japan and with our primitive Japanese explained that I was the senior, they start bowing to him as a senior. And he had to say, “No, no, it’s her.” If you appear with a man and he’s your husband, people are very uncomfortable with what they see as a reversal of power.
Pema Khandro Rinpoche: I love this idea of going to other women, having that support, because it can be so isolating as a teacher.
Myoan Grace Schireson: I agree it’s important for a young female teacher to have a peer group to talk with about some of these things that come up. Teachers can go off the rails when they don’t have other teachers to talk to about what’s bothering them or what’s happening. I also think, as a psychologist, that women tend to be a little more emotional than men, and because of that, we’ve been taught to suppress our feelings. We’re considered too emotional, even hysterical. As a female teacher, as you enter the fray, when you feel something, make a note of it, review it, explore it. Don’t just push it away, saying, “Everything is empty, and I need to be humble, and who am I?” Really make note of discomforts that are arising. Explore when you feel like you’ve been put down. You don’t have to blow up in that moment. But do stay with it.
