Prajna Paramita: The Mother of All Buddhas
“Prajna Paramita is unguarded, but she is not naïve. She is ferocious and kind, both strong and soft. And when she becomes embodied in one of us, she is none other than who we are. She knows the ground upon which she stands, and she does not fail to cover it.”
How do we reconcile the systemic harm perpetuated through the construction of gender with the ultimate truth of selflessness? In this talk, Zuisei speaks about reclamation of identity as a form of embodiment of Prajna Paramita, wisdom beyond wisdom.
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard.
This transcript is based on Zuisei’s notes and may differ slightly from the final talk.
Good afternoon, sisters, wild grasses that cannot be cut down, whose strength is in their very being, their very suchness…
As Hojin Sensei and I were talking about this intensive retreat and how to best structure it, we were walking a live line between honoring tradition and also investigation. As we’ve acknowledged in previous Wild Grasses retreats, and as Hojin Sensei often likes to say, we really don’t know what a schedule or a training framework designed by and for women would look like. It’s never been done.
Women, nuns primarily, have always adapted themselves to schedules and training models that were in turn adapted from models created by and for men. And the women had more or less agency—depending on the place, the lineage, the customs—to modify those models as they saw fit. But, as far as I know, they were never able to create something from scratch.
This is our case too. Yet, for some years now, Hojin Sensei has courageously, gently but firmly, been pushing against the edges of the way we do things and has been asking, can this be done a different way to better suit a female body, a female way of being? Is there something that we’re not doing that we should, because we are missing it and we don’t even know it?
That said, it’s not like we went radical and changed the whole thing either. Clearly, we didn’t. But, we did make small changes here and there. And she has made changes over the years in the way that we’ve run this retreat. We keep refining and then observing and taking notes and seeing, what works and what doesn’t. And more importantly, what do we not yet see? So maybe after this retreat, if you have ideas you’d like to share with us, things that you think would enhance or complement the practices we already engage in, you can let us know.
One of the things we wanted to do this weekend is bring our ancestors into the room.
We wanted to name the many women whose lives and presence have allowed us to be here today. To practice and train in the ways that we have been doing, and hopefully will continue to do. To honor and offer gratitude to them, to bow and meet them.
Because throughout the weekend we are threading through the stillness and silence some of the stories of these women ancestors, letting them sit with us in our zazen, eat with us during oryoki, we decided we would make these formal talks a little shorter. Let them be just a kind of invocation—further invocation—of our ancestors.
In my own case, I moved around quite a bit in my mind before settling on who or what I wanted to speak about. So many of the stories are double-edged swords. They speak of beautiful women who scarred themselves in order to be allowed into practice centers. Women who waited all their lives for their husbands to die so they could do what they wanted to do from the beginning. Even the really powerful ones have elements that give you pause. This one killed her husband. That one went mad after losing everyone she loved. This one was a prostitute. That one, according to herself, became like a stick of dry wood, completely uninterested in anything having to do with sense pleasures. In the end, I decided to go back all the way to the source: to Prajna Paramita, the mother of all buddhas, the womb of all buddhas.
I’ve always liked the fact that in both Eastern and Western traditions, the personification of wisdom is portrayed as female. Sophia, in Greek and Roman philosophy. And in Buddhism, Prajna Paramita is, of course, the perfection of wisdom—she is the “one who shows the world for what it is,” as the Perfection of Wisdom in 8,000 Lines says. The one who shows the world for what it is. Therefore, she is the one who is the world as it is.
And I’ve really been reflecting on this—what does it mean to be and therefore to reveal yourself as the true world? How do you be truth, without cutting any part of yourself out? Without smothering, silencing, or otherwise suppressing any part of what it means to be you?
I don’t claim to have an answer, but I sense that it involves a whole lot of space, boundless amounts of acceptance, and equal doses of fierceness and kindness.
There is that anecdote I’ve told before about a man who asked a Masai warrior what makes a great warrior. The Masai answered that a good warrior is fearless. But a great warrior is fierce when they need to be fierce, and kind when they need to be kind. Most important, they know what is required when, and they’re not afraid to embody it (that’s my addition, since it’s not enough to know when you need to be soft, when you need to be firm. You also need to be able to fully, fearlessly, and unapologetically be either).
So let me first start with fierceness. Someone sent me this poem by a Sumerian High Priestess by the name of Enheduanna. She is considered to be the earliest identified author—male or female—in history, and this poem is dated to about 2,300 before the common era (so almost 5,000 years ago). At that time in Sumeria, in what is now Iraq, a pair of moon gods was worshipped. Nanna was the moon God, Inana the moon Goddess, and here Enheduanna is praising Inanna’s fierceness and power.
This is just a short fragment of this poem, which is called “Exaltation of Inanna:”
What once was chanted of Nanna,
Let it now be yours--
That you are as lofty as Heaven,
Let it be known!
That you are as wide as the Earth,
Let it be known!
That you devastate the rebellious,
Let it be known!
That you roar at the land,
Let it be known!
That you rain your blows on their heads,
Let it be known!
That you feast on corpses like a dog,
Let it be known!
That your glance is lifting toward them,
Let it be known!
That your glance is like lightning striking,
Let it be known!
That you are victorious,
Let it be known!
That this is not said of Nanna,
It is said of you-—
THIS is your greatness.
You alone are the High One.
To me, here is an expression of a spirituality that is bold, unafraid of itself and its own power.
It’s not particularly nice. It’s certainly not subdued, but it is completely itself. And, it doesn’t apologize for itself. It knows its own worth and is not afraid to claim it. It makes me think of something that Rev. Angel Kyodo Williams said at the end of one of her talks, You can never pay a black woman enough. Amen.
If Prajna is wisdom, and wisdom is seeing things as they are, and seeing things as they are is seeing them as empty of self nature, what does it mean to realize selflessness and, when needed, to fully embody self? What does it mean to practice, to cultivate selflessness, in this female form? I don’t mean to realize it. Selflessness is selflessness from an absolute point of view, male or female, gay or straight, young or old. But to practice it, to embody it, is by no means the same thing. So how do we do it? How do we show the world as it is, ourselves as we are? How do we bring forth this fierceness and kindness, clarity and ease, and a deep, deep understanding of what it means to be fully human?
One of the reasons I was drawn to this poem is because it is so old. Not as old as Prajna Paramita, who is ageless, or rather, who is time itself, is the passing of seasons, is old age, sickness, and death, is like Inanna, a life giving, and a life-taking force and is so ancient as to be elemental.
Enheduanna wrote this poem long before the poems of the first nuns were written. When she did, when she composed these hymns, as they’re called—and there are 42 of them—nothing like them existed at the time. In writing them she says to her father: “My king, something has been created that no one has created before.” She’s not shy about her achievement. Like Hojin Sensei who says most of us women should make a practice, when someone praises us, of saying, “Thank you. It’s true.” Some of us need to cultivate humility, some of us should go for panache.
I was reading, again, through the Therigata poems, and I have to say I have trouble with them.
Did these deeply realized women really feel that negatively about their bodies, about desire, about their own humanity? Or was that what they thought they had to write in order to be considered serious practitioners? Was that what was written for them? (As it says in the introduction, these were written over hundreds of years. Who knows who added what to them).
I simply do not believe that we have to stop being human or stop being female in order to wake up. I don’t think it helps us to be afraid or disgusted of our physicality, our sensuality, and certainly not of our power. How can we be or show the world as it is if we are?
Then, there is kindness.
I was reading Rengetsu’s story, whom most of you know is the 19th century author of the Wild Grasses poem, as well as a nun, a potter, a calligrapher. When she was young she also trained as a samurai and became an expert Go player. So she was accomplished in multiple ways, and yet was also extremely kind—perhaps because she experienced so much heart break. Everyone that she was close to and whom she loved died during her lifetime. She could perform tea ceremony, and she could disarm a drunkard with a jujitsu move. It’s said that more than once she gave her robe to passing beggars.
As she became famous, she started writing her poems on the work of young, struggling artists to help them sell it. And she was always raising money for disaster victims. She even agreed to inscribe some fake pottery (made to look like hers) with her own calligraphy. These copying artists had the gall to copy her pottery, then approach her to ask if she could inscribe it, because her calligraphy was inimitable, and she did. She did, and she gave them some of her real bowls so they could better copy them.
One night, a thief came into her room, and she lit a lamp for him to see better and said, “You won’t find anything of value here but you are welcome to whatever you need. You must be starving to be so desperate. Let me fix you a bowl of tea-rice.” How fearless, and how tender do you need to be in order to respond in this way! How undefended, how wise, how clear-seeing of another’s suffering.
To me, this is Prajna Paramita, unguarded but also not naïve. Ferocious and kind, strong and soft. And when she becomes embodied, no one other than herself. She knows the ground upon which she stands, and she does not fail to cover it.
I think of Majaprajapati, what she must have been going through when she decided to lead 500 women in shaving their heads, and putting on saffron robes, and making the pilgrimage to Vesali to petition the Buddha to let them enter the monastic sangha. And maybe it wasn’t 500 women, maybe that’s an exaggeration. Maybe it was 20 or 10 or 5. Still, they were bucking every convention of their time and culture. They were doing what women were not supposed to do. They were saying, we will no longer wait to inhabit our lives, our bodies. We will no longer play the supporting role, for we need to own our own paths. This is what the first women in any field have given us, The courage to say, “I’m sorry that you do not like this or you do not agree, but I’m going to do it anyway, because I have to.”
So how do we be wisdom, Prajna Paramita? How do we truly ask, what is my offering for this life, this time and circumstance? How do we listen carefully to the answer, and then step forward and claim it? Rengetsu says this to a group of young nuns on their begging rounds—but she could be speaking to us, right here today:
First steps on the
Long path to Truth:
Please do not dream
Your lives away,
Walk on to the end.
Explore further
01 : Perfection of Wisdom in 8,000 Lines
03 : Lotus Moon: The Poetry of the Buddhist Nun Rengetsu by John Stevens