Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 304: What You Can Learn from the Buddha’s Wife and Aunt | Pamela Weiss

Episode Date: November 30, 2020

The women around the Buddha dropped a ton of useful wisdom, but I suspect you haven’t heard much about that. Why? Why have these women been largely written out of history? And what do these hidden figures have to teach us? We’re diving in on that today with Pamela Weiss, dharma teacher in the Zen and Theravada traditions and author of A Bigger Sky. Last week, we had on Bhikkhu Bodhi, who talked about the words of the Buddha. You might think of this episode as a follow-up to that one—part compelling history, part injection of approachable wisdom. In this conversation, we talk about Pamela’s research into the Buddha’s wife, mom, and aunt; how and why Buddhism became tilted toward the masculine; and the benefits both Pamela and I have experienced from bringing more feminine energy to our practice and life. Where to find Pamela Weiss online:  Website: https://pamelaweiss.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PamelaWeissAuthor/ Books Mentioned: A Bigger Sky: Awakening a Fierce Feminine Buddhism by Pamela Weiss https://pamelaweiss.com/publications2 Therigatha: Selected Poems of the First Buddhist Women translated by Charles Hallisey https://bookshop.org/books/therigatha-selected-poems-of-the-first-buddhist-women/9780674427730 The First Free Women: Poems of the Early Buddhist Nuns by Matty Weingast https://bookshop.org/books/the-first-free-women-poems-of-the-early-buddhist-nuns/9781611807769 2020 has been a doozy, so this year we’re offering Ten Percent Happier subscriptions at a 40% discount. Get this deal before it ends on December 1st by going to www.tenpercent.com/november.  Take Part in the New Year’s Series To submit a question or share a reflection dial 646-883-8326 and leave us a voicemail. If you’re outside the United States, you can email us a voice memo file in mp3 format to [e-mail]. The deadline for submissions is Monday December 7th.  Full Show Notes & Resources: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/pamela-weiss-304 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. to baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. For maybe see, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey guys, before we get started, one item of business, 2020, as we all know, has been, let's just say interesting. So this year, we're offering 10% happier subscriptions at a 40% discount. We don't do discounts of this size all the time. Of course, nothing is permanent.

I think the Buddha said something about that, nothing being permanent. So get this deal before it ends on December 1st by going to 10% dot com slash November. That's 10% one word all spelled out dot com slash November for 40% off your subscription to the 10% happier app. One more item of business and it is an invitation for you to participate in this show. For new years, we here at 10% are going to do a whole series of episodes where we say, goodbye to the dumpster fire of 2020 and kickoff 2021 by taking a counterintuitive approach to the whole New Year, New Year narrative, which strongly implies that you have to completely reinvent yourself.

That line of thinking is often based on shame and self-loathing. Our line of thinking is that perhaps we can flip the script a little bit. We are going to be exploring the science-based case for the rather cheesy notion of self-love. And then we're going to take the crucial next step of helping you operationalize that idea in your life. Obviously, there are a whole lot of questions you might have. Like if you love yourself, will you slide into sloppy resignation? How do you do

self-love anyway? Isn't it just an empty platitude, et cetera, et cetera? Hence this invitation. We would love to hear from you and we will answer your questions during the New Year's series right here on this podcast. So to submit a question or simply to share your reflections, dial us at 646-883-836-646-883-8366 and leave us a voice mail. The deadline for submissions is Monday, December 7th. If you're outside the United States, we've put details in the show notes on how to submit a question via an alternate method. To be clear, alongside the Special Podcast series, we're gonna be launching around New Years. We're also doing a New Years meditation challenge on the 10% happier app,

so feel free to ask us lots of meditation questions as well. All right, business concluded. Now today's episode, the women around the Buddha dropped a ton of extremely useful wisdom, but I suspect you may not have heard much about that. Why? Why have these women largely been written out of history? And what do these hidden figures have to teach us? We're going to dive in on that today with Pamela Weiss, Dharma teacher in the Zen and Teravada traditions and author of a reasonably new book called A Bigger Sky. You may remember last week we had on Bikku Bodhi who talked about the words of the Buddha. He's

one of the most prominent translators of the Buddhist texts. We're thinking about this episode today with Pamela as a kind of follow-up to that one. It will be part compelling history. She's a great storyteller. And then part injection of approachable wisdom. In this conversation, we talk about Pamela's research into the Buddha's wife, mom, and aunt, how and why Buddhism became tilted toward the masculine, and the benefits that both Pamela and I have experienced from bringing more feminine energy to our practice

and to our life. So here we go with Pamela Weiss. Pamela, thanks for doing this. Nice to meet you. Yeah, nice to meet you. So how did you come to get interested in the... I used this term with you before we started rolling the hidden figures, these women who seem to have been written out of the Buddhist history, how did you get interested in this subject? That's a really good question. I think that the beginning of my interest came from present time experience with, in particular, friendships that I had developed with Teravod and Buddhist nuns

that I had developed with Teravod and Buddhist nuns, and knowing their stories very personally, and painfully seeing the situation that they are in now. That is the result of many, many, many, many years of history and misinformation in large part that's continued to create kind of oppressive situation for them. And so in a way it started in the present and then I went backward in time and was looking for, you know, how did all this start? And there's a famous story about the Buddha being reluctant to admit women as nuns into the Sangha. And so as I started to explore those stories,

some of these figures became quite vivid for me and I did a lot of research and there's not a lot out there. But it seemed clear to me that the history, it's not that they weren't there, it's that it wasn't written down. I want to take a really deep dive into that, but just so I understand it, you refer to TeraVada monks and just for the, TeraVada nuns, rather, and just for the uninitiated TeraVada is sort of the old school of Buddhism.

There are many schools of Buddhism, TeraVada, Tibetans, and TeraVada is sort of the oldest of those schools, and there are monks, and there are nuns. And you said you spent time with some nuns, and their situation was, doesn't sound like it was great. What's going on there? Well, the situation currently with the nuns within that tradition is that there are rules that were ostensibly passed down from the time of the Buddha, which keep them always in a junior position.

So one of the most egregious of these rules is that the most senior nun is always junior to the most junior monk. And I had the great good fortune of befriending a group of these sisters who fled, actually, from England and came to the US to try to find a less oppressive situation. And I was very moved by their experience. And part of that history is that it's claimed that these rules were dictated by the Buddha to keep the nuns in place. And then there's further back stories that show that the Buddha himself was reluctant to even admit women at all into the Sangha. So that was the genesis of my interest in my research, in the digging around, and discovering a lot about these, what you call hidden figures, which is a good word for it, I think.

But so is it true? Did the Buddha design rules to subordinate women? And was he reluctant to allow women into the, the sangha, which is just a sort of poly and ancient, the ancient language of poly, it's the word for the community of meditators? Is that all true? It's an important question to ask right now what's true, right? Because what we know is that nothing was written down that the Buddha said for at least 200 years after he spoke, so the teachings came down in an oral tradition. And when things were written down, they were written down by primarily male monastic scribes, who we might say had an agenda.

They had a position. They had a perspective that it's unclear what the Buddha actually said. It's unclear whether these things happened or whether they came in later. We do know, or it's said, that in the early creation of the community that the Buddha was reputed to have said that he wanted to create what he called a fourfold psalm go or community of lay women and lay men, meaning non-monastic. So people like us living in the world, and monks and nuns. So the later description that women were not allowed in and later kind of had these oppressive rules foisted upon them, it's questionable, I think. impressive rules, foisted upon them. It's questionable, I think.

It's hard to compute because the Buddha and Buddhism, the primacy of compassion in this tradition, you know, it's placed right in the center. And so it's hard to imagine why somebody who was purportedly fully enlightened would want to subordinate women. And it's further hard for me to imagine how anybody could justify the ongoing system of saying, well, the most senior nun needs to bow to the most junior male novice who just

got his head shaved. Like, none of this makes sense, given what I know about the teachings. I couldn't agree more. I mean, it doesn't. It doesn't make a lot of sense. I think that an argument could be made that the Buddha himself may have put restrictions on women, maybe not that one in particular, but others as a form of protection, because he comes from a time, a place, a culture where women were property essentially. And so if women were solo alone, you know, no longer connected to a husband, a family, et cetera, it could have been that it was dangerous for women to be out wandering around in the countryside as the monks did. And so one could argue that it came out of compassion.

But I think the truth is we don't really know. We don't really know what happened. What we do know is that this kind of shadow of misogyny and of oppression toward women and toward these sort of absencing of the stories of these figures, that we know is true. So, let's remedy that, absence, because, you know, it's a strike I can name. Some of the figures around the Buddha or male like sorry puta and. Ananda assistant and even I'm Guli Mala the serial killer who turned into a like an or on to whatever. But I know there were women around for example I know the Buddha's mother.

This is all the legend that's been handed down the Buddha's mother died and he was raised by his aunt She's the one who's reputed to have convinced them to allow the women into the Sangha and then I know that he had a wife Right who he abandoned in order to go into the forest to get enlightened Of course, he did that abandoning before he was enlightened so And they named his kid Rahulula, which translates into fetter. Yep. So before he was enlightened, he was pretty unenlightened. All of which to say, even for some guy

who tries to be reasonably enlightened now, most of the people who I'm familiar with from the time of the Buddha are guys. So can you tell us more about who these key female figures were? Well, I will. And I just want to say that your experience of most of the key figures are guys is universally true, I think, that one of the stories that I share in my book and one of the stories that I share in my book

and one of the stories that impacted me most, not in a direct way causing me to do this research, but based on my history, causing me to do this research, is that I spent many years in the Zen tradition, including a number of years of monastic training, and there's this beautiful practice in that tradition resigning the names of the lineage.

So it's sort of a remembering that we didn't just make this up ourselves, that were connected to a history of real human beings, who go back and back and back and back, and did the real work that was needed to wake up and that we connect ourselves to them. And so every morning in Zen temples around the world, you chant the names of the lineage and some years after I had left and came back for a visit that I had the experience of it in the morning during the chanting, there was a new chant that was announced and it

was the names of the women, ancestors. And all those years, I spent chanting the names of the men, and I never even thought about it. I didn't even know. It didn't occur to me. Like, why are there no women on this list, right? And then I heard the names, this chanting of the names of the women teachers who I didn't know.

I had done all kinds of research and heard stories about and studied all of these male figures in my lineage. But I heard the names of the women and after the chanting was done, I just burst into tears. And I think that my experience is true for many of us, and just as you were saying, that we don't even know what we're missing. No, we sort of so, we've adapted so much to a particular perspective about what practices and how it's passed on and on and on and on like that,

that it takes a wake-up call in a certain way to realize, oh wait, there's more. And I think in regard to what you and I were just talking about a moment ago, and there's more, is scant, you know, it's thin. There's not a lot that we know because so little was recorded. So I think it's important for all of us. This was in some way the upshot of my own experience, kind of diving into all of this, was recognizing that as much as we know about the meditation practices that we've been given to us about the teachings, about the stories, it's a very thin slice. And that, in the end, we could feel disappointed, but it's actually very encouraging. It's very positive. Oh, there's so much more that we haven't even uncovered yet.

But it may not be uncoverable if it ever got written down. Yeah, it's funny because when I was writing, I did all this research and came up with not very much. And I ended up writing a whole chapter that's primarily historical fiction. So I ended up telling the story of the life of the Buddha through the voices of these three women who you mentioned through the voice of his mother, his aunt who raised him and his wife. Because I wanted that us to bring forward those perspectives. We can know that they're there and we can do some. There's more and more books and stories coming out, but it's opening up the understanding

that there are limits to what we know so far. So let's talk about what we do know. And I invite you to start wherever you want. Who are some of these hidden figures that you can de-obscure or unobscure or whatever the word is? Illuminate for us. Well, let me start by saying a little,

one of the things that was most encouraging to me was this kind of retelling of the story of the Buddha's awakening. And this is not only about hidden figures, it's also about a kind of feminine perspective. And I'll say more what I mean by that. But I find that also very encouraging. And then I'm happy to say some about in particular Mahap Mahapajapati, who was the Buddha's aunt, who founded the Nansanga, and his wife, who have a great affection for her at this point, given what I now know. But the story of the life of the Buddha in a mythic way is often described as a kind of classic hero's journey. And it's kind of a solo

journey and he strives really hard and has many people know in the story of the Buddha. He takes himself to the brink of death through extreme asceticism and so on and then he realizes oops, that was not quite the right way to go and then he has this turn in which he recognizes that sort of self-hatred and harshness to his own body and intense striving is not the right way to go because he's been basically starving himself. And at that point, he receives nourishment from this young woman, Sujata. And for me, again, this is probably more mythic story than historical story, but the myth is important

because it points us to something really essential on the path, which is that for us too, we need to be careful about having our own meditative practice or spiritual practice become one of intense, you know, pushing and striving and efforting, and also to imagine that we're doing it alone, that what we see in the story, the mythic story of the Buddha is that his receiving of nourishment is essential. And so that seems to me to be a really important lesson on the path, that it's not a solo journey, it's a connected journey, and that we need to literally keep ourselves well fed,

not just with food, but with beauty and relationships and art and rest and all of that. And that all by itself sort of changes the color and flavor of the path in a way. And the other piece to say is that there's this other pivotal moment once the Buddha becomes, or the soon to be Buddha becomes nourished, he sits down and says, okay, now I'm not getting up until I really understand, you know, suffering in the end of suffering, how things are and how to be free. And he has some trouble, like we all do when we sit, you know, he has doubts and he's unhappy and he gets cranky and cold and all the various difficulties that he has.

And at some point, he is having an an incredible intense moment of doubt and the question that comes is, who do you think you are? And I think many of us who've tried practicing meditation or imagine that we might wake up have probably had some version of that question, right? Like, who do you think you, we think you could wake up? Come on. And he is this beautiful gesture at that moment where he doesn't like debate or argue. He just reaches down and touches the earth. And in some stories, it says that the earth shakes. And for me, this too is a beautiful expression of a reorientation of the path from kind of up and out, you know, a transcendent path in which we're trying to get out of the body and get somewhere better as opposed to a coming down and in. You know, into the body, into the ground, touching the earth, the earth has representative of a great nourishing maternal force. And so that's just

a place to start, that if we begin to bring in these lesser known elements or highlight them, they're already there, they just don't get highlighted, then we have a different flavor of practice. We don't have something where we're like striving and scrambling and hurting ourselves and imagining we're supposed to do it alone. Or that we're supposed to get up and out of our experience, but that we actually are trying to come down and into our experience. So that's I think a good place to start. That's still the story of the Buddha. Just to quickly say, I saw a bumper sticker once that said enlightenment as a team sport.

Yeah, exactly. And it doesn't usually get conveyed that way. Right? But what we were talking about before, what's called Sanga or community, is a central aspect. And yet often people think, oh, meditation is about this solo event that I go do by myself. So it is, we all have to take responsibility for our own mind and heart. But we do it together. We do it in a joined way. So who would be nice to hear about the Buddha's wife, Yasodara, also named Yashodara, or Yashodara? And there are places in the early teachings, which in what's called the Pali Canon, which are supposedly the early teachings of the Buddha. Pali was the language at the time, where Yashodara is not even, she doesn't even get her own name.

She's only referred to as the mother of Rahulah, who as you had mentioned earlier is their son. So, that's the extremity with which these figures have been written out. And for me, it's one of the most troubling details of the story of the life of the Buddha is that he left his wife, right? Not only did he leave his wife, but he left his wife and his young son. Why?

Because he wanted to go figure out how to solve suffering. Meanwhile, he is creating quite a bit of it. Yes, point important. I mean, I'm not defending the leaving of the wife at all, but just to point out, he did creating quite a bit of it. Yes, point, but important. I mean, I'm not defending the leaving of the wife at all, but just to point out, he did that in his late 20s while he was miserable and cussed it in some report. At least this is all the legend. I was handed down, but he was living with his wealthy royal dad and was in this marriage and they had a kid.

And meanwhile, he decided he didn't want to be a successor king he wanted to be a spiritual adept and he Left this comfortable life and went into the forest to do all sorts of extreme meditation Anyway, I'm not defending the leaving the wife. I think that it's hard for me to get over to but I think it's just worth putting the context on it that this is before he was the Buddha. This is before he was the Buddha and he was suffering as he was suggesting. He was suffering a lot.

He was being slotted into a role in his life that wasn't a good fit for him. And I think, you know, many people come to a meditative practice or a spiritual practice for exactly that reason. It somehow feel like the life that they're in, the life that I'm in or you're in doesn't feel like a good fit. It's kind of destroying us in some way. And so there's a wish to find something else. And sometimes that requires some renunciation. And in this case, the wife was part of that renunciation. It is said that she joins his community later.

So there may be some resolution. I'm as funny as I'm hearing some children screaming outside my windows. This is the role of the mother. It's like they care of the screaming kids. I can tell you as a father that I deal with screaming children not frequently, but nonetheless, nonetheless they do attempt to flock to mommy. So what's interesting to me is that in later teachings, there are alternate versions of this story. So the early teachings basically write, yes, it are out of the story, or make her this kind of phantom, you know, mother-taking

care of the son, not important figure. But later descriptions, some of which again are more mythic than historical probably suggests that she and Siddhartha kind of walk a parallel spiritual path and where he goes out and wanders to find his way, she stays home and finds her way. Taking care of the hearth, taking care of the hearth, taking care of the children, taking care of life in this way. For me, that particular description feels like this wealth of lost teachings. Because how many of us now wouldn't love to have some teachings about how do we practice in the midst of daily life? For those of us who aren't monks and nuns, for those of us who aren't wandering renunciance, giving up everything, wouldn't it be nice to know like how do you practice while you're raising your screaming kids or your laughing kids? And how do you practice while you're raising your screaming kids or your laughing kids?

And how do you practice when you're cleaning the house and earning a living? And this seems to be that there's an enormous dearth of that orientation to practice that has been handed down to us. And I don't know what she discovered. I don't know what her teachings were, but we know she was there. And we could try on this idea that what if it were the case that living a life fully engaged in the world were an equal opportunity door to awakening, rather than the way that it's mostly been passed down, which is that you need to go to a cave somewhere or go to a monastery or renounce everything.

That's kind of the cast system that we are in in terms of what's a heavy duty awakening and then what the rest of us are doing. And I feel like Yasadara gives us this doorway to consider. Like, what would it be like for us? And I don't think we can lean on her for the answer. We can just let her open the door and then it's for us to walk in and discover. What would that mean? Maybe that's the task of our time, no?

That's how I hold it at this moment. So there's really, beyond what you've just said, there's, we don't have a sense of what she was like as a character. Well, I will say most of the stories of her describe that she was the daughter of a neighboring king or a clansman and that the Buddha's father sort of put on this festival in which he invited all the neighboring daughters to come by.

And Siddhartha wasn't that interested, but somehow there was some real love or affection between them, that they had a real loving relationship, and that most accounts that I read describe her as being, what we might call today, kind of spunky. She had her own fire, she had her own flare, and she seems to have really loved him. That's about as much as we know. Do we know what it was like when he came back home after he was the Buddha, and she saw him for the first time after he bailed on her?

That's a really great question because when he comes back, she refuses to go see him. So the scene, as I've read about it, is sort of everybody flocks to go see the son who left, except her. She stays in her quarters and won't go to visit. And he comes to visit her. He comes to check in with her. So presumably, there's some reconciliation that happens in that, but she won't sort of bow to him in that way. It's kind of an interesting detail.

Now, we do know that Rahulah or Fetter joins the Sangha becomes among does she join? She does join, at least as far as we know. She also joins. There is, as you may be aware, there's a text, which is a set of poems from the early Buddhist nuns which are their songs of awakening. And Mahapajapati, who was the Buddhist aunt, who raised him, she has a poem, but Yasadara does not. So her being written out is pretty

conclusive. So we don't actually know a lot. We know she joined, but we don't know much about her. So let's talk about the ant. As you said, after the Buddha's mother was said to have died in childbirth, and so his mother's sister, his aunt, raised him, what have you been able to learn about her? Well, she is quite an amazing figure and for me, her story represents two things that I think are important for us. One is just this immense compassion, right?

So imagine your her and your sister dies in childbirth, or just past childbirth, and you are grieving at the same time that you now have this kid to take care of. So it's quite a difficult situation that she's in, and she raises her sister's son, Siddhartha, sort of side by side. I often think of it as breast by breast with her own son. So the two boys grow up together.

And she is by all accounts, this like deeply kind and compassionate figure. And she does have a poem in the accounting of these nuns and her advice to us in that poem is basically to say, look at everyone as if they might be the future Buddha. That was sort of her what happened for her as she raised this little boy who became the Buddha. She said what mother wouldn't imagine that her child could also become the Buddha and the really encouragement for us to see each other that way. It's beautiful, powerful teaching. But there is this other story, which is unclear, really,

if it's myth or history, about her going three times to basically plead or beg or petition the Buddha, who's now the Buddha, to join the community and to invite women to join the community. And in mythic description, when they say three times, it often just means many. So in real time, you could imagine she traveled from her home to where he was hanging out with his monks and said, I'd like to join. And the story goes that three times, he says, no. Now, this is just like the story with him abandoning his wife. This is tough. Like, why would he do that? Why would he do that? Maybe I've heard some people describe he was pushing a social experiment already pretty far having a community within a very stratified caste system

in which everyone was invited in, everyone except women. So maybe that was as far as he felt he could go and that inviting women in would just be pushing the edge too far. Maybe he was really concerned for the safety of women because these are wandering renunciates, wandering around the countryside and maybe he felt they wouldn't be safe. I'm guessing, you know, those are kind of generous options. And the story goes that the third time that pajapiti, who goes on to become maha, pajapiti, maha means great. So first she's just pajapiti, and when she becomes a nun, she becomes great pajapiti. The third time she brings a whole crew of women with her,

and they arrive outside the gates and are wailing and crying because they're tired and their feet are blistered and bloodied and they're dusty. And the Buddha said no at third time. And it's described that Ananda, who you mentioned before, is the Buddha's attendant, hears their cries. And he comes out and says, what's going on? And they say, we want to join the Holy Life.

And so he goes and petitions the Buddha himself. And if you put this in a modern context, you could imagine that you're going to go and take issue with your boss about something that you disagree with. And Ananda is, by all accounts, a kind of easy-going, really warm-hearted guy. And he really takes a stand here, and he goes, and he kind of pins the boot in a corner and says, didn't she raise you side-by-side with her own son? Yes, she did. And isn't it true that women are as fully capable of attaining enlightenment as men? Yes, it's true. Then how can you not let her in?

And eventually the Buddha conceits and says, okay, and that is how they come. And this is in the spirit of hidden figures. I think a nanda here is such a beautiful description of how to be an ally, how to be an advocate for those women or others whose voices are not being heard, who are being locked out literally of where they want to go or what is possible. And so in this case I feel like the stories of Mahapajapati and Ananda are really intertwined in this way. And where Pajapati demonstrates this deep compassion but also there's some persistence there, right? She doesn't, take no for an answer. Like, no, okay, never mind.

She comes back and she comes back and then she brings a crowd of people with her. She's really a lot of determination and courage and fortitude, so important. And then Ananda, who for those of us who sit in positions of relative privilege, like what does it take to listen to the cries, to hear those who are being left out, and then to advocate, to take a stand, even if it might be dangerous, you know, like maybe your boss is going to fire you, right? Maybe the Buddha is not going to be happy with Ananda, but he listens. So it is beautiful

metaphoric and real ideas about how these stories can impact not just how we practice meditation, but how we understand what it means to be awake or trying to be awake in the world, in the face of real life and living in the world and living with difficulty. So all of that was what was so encouraging for me in uncovering these stories. Much more of my conversation with Pamela Weiss coming up right after this. Life is short and it's full of a lot of interesting questions.

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You can also listen to Add Free on the Amazon Music or Wondering Up. A few more questions about my, uh, Bajapati. The Buddhist cousin that she raised alongside him. Is that David Dutta? No. Okay, cause I because you hear stories about him having an evil cousin David Dota. Yeah, that was a different question. Okay. Yeah, both sisters, this tells you something about the culture. Both sisters Maya, the mother who died and Pajapati, they were sisters and they were both married to the same king. Oh, okay. So it was more like a half brother. Exactly. Yeah.

And what happens to the half brother is he, does he join the saga? Yeah, he joins the song into they all do more or less, you know. And then the other thing about Mahapajapati is that you reference so that there is, there's this book that's called the Terata, and it's a collection of poems from early Buddhist women. You use the term songs of enlightenment, that's a bit of a term of art. It is not uncommon allegedly after somebody gets enlightened that they spontaneously break out in poetry. I don't know if it's actually a song, but they put words together to try to describe the ineffable. And so this is a

collection of those, as you mentioned, and you talked about her entry in the terracotta being about looking at everybody like it could be a future Buddha. And that might deserve some more contemplation. Because it just reminded me, as I heard you say, about my own tendency to be judgmental, which is something I've been called out for. And so we'll actually just put a little bit more meat on the bone there that one of the things that, in particular, professionally, people close to me have said is that I have a tendency sometimes to have like a good bucket and a bad bucket And the if you're in the bad bucket, you know, it's not a fun place to be and so I've really been working on that When you talked about looking at everybody like there could be a future Buddha

Just thinking about that probably in my case given my skepticism a little bit more metaphorically yes, then literally that You can really limit people's potential by superimposing some sort of ceiling on them based on reflexive judgments you might reach. Whereas if you assume that people have greatness in them, I just remember this line from a movie in the 80s, what's it called Stand By Me or a Lean On Me, or something like that, about a school principal and he said something

the effective, people tend to rise to the level of expectation. And I found that trying to my limited ability to use that approach, doing my best to see greatness, even if I struggle, rather than giving in to my reflex of judgment, has been an interesting practice. Beautiful practice.

Really, I think that's right on the nose as it were for what is being pointed to in her teaching. And to see, as I think comes clearly through these teachings, can we see suffering rather than evil? Can we see that when any of us, we or they are behaving badly, that it's not coming out of some kind of innate badness. It's coming out of confusion. It's coming out of one's own suffering. I mean, certainly true for me,

if I'm judging myself or others, it's generally not coming from a very happy place. But if I can remember when I'm seeing someone who's behaving badly, where that behavior is likely coming from in them, then I can have a more compassionate response. It doesn't mean I don't take action. That's the thing I love about the story of Mahapajapati is that she's this deeply compassionate being, but she doesn't just like sit back and radiate love. No, she's out there like walking hundreds of miles, petitioning the Buddha. She's got

some fierceness in her. She's got some real dedication. She's some perseverance, some grip. And those two things together are important, I think especially now, and we tend to separate them, right? Like compassion is somehow this soft squishy thing that doesn't, isn't about action, whereas action has to be kind of sharp and hard or something. Yes. Hard or something? Yes Difference between idiot compassion and fierce compassion is often those are some of the phrases that often get used. Yeah. Yeah Are there things to say about Maya?

The mom She's the one who maybe the least is known about because she dies so soon She's the one who maybe the least is known about because she dies so soon. We know that she is married to the Buddhist father, who was in some cases called the King, and in some cases just like the head clansman. She dies very soon after his birth. And that's about all we know. I think her story is a story of the importance of acknowledging our mortality and acknowledging, you know, again, this is kind of an emithic or archetypal way, acknowledging that life

happens and death happens, but as far as her as a person, not a lot, is known about her. What more is worth saying in your view about the terracotta and the wisdom that we can find in there from these women who were there at the founding of Buddhism and yet we don't hear much from them. What are the biggest takeaways from you from having spent time looking at that material? takeaways from you from having spent time looking at that material?

Well, I think that a lot of the qualities that I was describing in this kind of slightly alternate version of the Buddhist path of awakening, you know, the need for nutrients, for tenderness, for gentleness, for relationship, for support, for nourishment, and those qualities come through a lot in their poems, in their descriptions, and you were correct in saying they're not literally songs, that's kind of a liberal translation, but those poems are in many ways meant to represent their understanding of awakening. And the flavor of their understanding, I mean, there are many poems and they're not all the same, but there is this flavor of heartfulness, I would say. And as I was describing this kind of coming down into the body in a grounded way, as opposed to transcending up and out, all of those qualities come through in those

poems and give us, as I think is the point of these stories, is that it can begin to give us a different sense of what walking the path might look like and even what awakening might look like. I think many of us have some, you know, whether we're brand new to meditation or we have been reading about it or studying it or practicing it for a long time. Most of us carry some kind of a fantasy idea of what enlightenment is, what awakening is. And those ideas, like many things in our culture, are conditioned by the stories we've heard and the language we use. And these stories in this language begins to give it a different tenor. In some ways it makes it less more human. It's a very human project that we are up to. And it's ours. It's ours to do. It's ours to embody.

It's ours to take up. Yeah. I don't know if this will land with you, but when you talk about the sort of emphasis on community, nurturance, ordinaryness, earthiness connecting down into your body instead of up into the stratosphere, I think about my own experience on meditation retreats that I spent so much time suffering, striving, lonely, and then I recently did a retreat to sort of unconventional retreat with some friends during the pandemic we all got tested and went through just a four of us with three friends and a teacher a teacher named Alexis Santos who's been on the show before and and me and two other friends and so the four of us just lived in a house for a teacher named Alexis Santos, who's been on the show before, and me and two other friends, and so the four of us just lived in a house for a little while, and the way Alexis ran,

the retreat was quite different from the other retreats that I've been on, where it was much less structured, and there was talking, not a ton of talking, but we would get together and talk to our money evenings, and so I was with people I know and love, really very strong, warm relationships. We could connect, you know, we could actually talk. And I didn't feel like I was, I wasn't pushing as hard because, you know, I wasn't challenging

myself to sit a certain amount. And, you know, Alexis was just very loose. And I had maybe the best retreat I've ever had. Yeah, I mean, I think we have to catch on to, and again, these alternate stories or hidden figures help clarify that the forms and structures of the meditative practices, whether it's a daily meditation practice that is Buddhist or secular,

or it's a more intensive retreat, that the structure and style of those are very narrow. It's very narrow, and there's a lot of possibility. And, you know, I could feel frustrated by that, but I think just as you're describing in your own experience, there's so much that's possible for us to discover about just as you said, a more communal, less athletic, if you will, you know, a less harsh, pushing, striving way, and what can open in that kind of situation. I mean, I think in my own practice,

I grew up in the Mahayana, which is the, you know, in Buddhism, there's what's called three turnings of the wheel, which are just kind of three different shapes or additions to the teaching and the terivada that we've been talking about are the early teachings that are supposedly the words of the Buddha himself and as I've been arguing in a way maybe those were the words of the Buddha, but they got written down long time after he spoke and they were clearly adapted There were things that were written down and there was a lot that wasn't written down, all right So in some of the later teachings, there is an emphasis on this not very good term, I think, of emptiness, which can be understood as, you know, there's a non-solidity to our experience. And many of us can see that as we start to sit, you know? We see that the thought that we have is gone.

It's here and then it's gone. The feeling is gone. The sensation is gone. We see the fluidity of our experience, which is really important. And that's the essence of the teachings of emptiness. But I often think that the flip side, not the opposite of,

but the flip side, like the opposite of, but the flip side like the opposite side of a coin of emptiness is connection. So we might say that there's no separate solid entities in the world, meaning everything is fluid and moving. That would be one way to say it, but the other side, as we could say, everything's connected. We're all part of this web. And that to me is the side that's gotten left out. So we've had this kind of emphasis on renunciation, on letting go, on, you know, which is important. But there is, as you were describing it, this other side, which is the truth of our deep connectedness. So for me, that is the essence of love. I don't mean love as an emotion. I mean love is like a force in our world. It's the force that connects that, you know, we have this fluid reality that we're floating around in, but it coheres.

And what is it that holds it together? For me, that's love, and it is embedded in these teachings. But again, it's not the part that's talked about so much, right? We have certain practices we do to cultivate the heart, which are beautiful. But I'm talking about something more essential. In the actual fabric of our experience, we can discover the truth of how connected we are. And the kind of experience you're describing reveals that shows us that. For me, like you, it was a long time getting there, you know, yeah, you just made a distinction that I don't understand and I want to understand. So I'm going to ask you about it. You talk

about we have practices to train the heart, meaning like we have, I assume you meant loving kindness practice, compassion practices where we can train up our ability to have warmth toward other people or to want to help them when they're suffering. That is different. You said then love as a force. I want to understand what you mean by that. Can you help me crack through my, um, uh, Thick skull? Well, I was tried to make a distinction between, um, what many of us think of as love as an emotion, as a feeling that can come, and in some circumstances we may feel love and in some we don't, right? Maybe some circumstances

we feel judgment, they feel opposite in some way, and then we can have these practices to help us get into the habit of being loving or being non-judgmental as you were describing. But I think there's something more fundamental, at least this is in my deepest moments of revelation of what our life is, is that the fabric of our world itself is made out of love. It's made out of connection. It's that energy. You feel it when you're in love. Like you feel that kind of energetic pull toward a person, right?

But I think in a quiet or way, that force is here all the time. That we, if we pay attention, if we take Mahabajapati's practice of imagining that each person could be a future Buddha, we begin to feel that sense of fundamental connection to one another. That feels so, I mean, so painfully missing in our world right now, where it's all divide, divide, divide. So, you're talking on an interpersonal level rather than a sabotomic level. Love isn't what holds the atoms and molecules of a rock together, but it is what can say, keep a company functioning well, or even allow me to feel the dimest sense of connection,

dim, but scalable, hopefully, to people with whom I disagree, or people I've never met, or people I never will met, or people who haven't been born yet, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. Well, I think that what holds atoms together is a great mystery. And I mean, there's no question, makes sense that you're confused by it because I'm making

a big leap here. But I think love is a big mystery. And so why not? Call it that. Like who knows what holds atoms together. But we know what that force is that holds atoms together, but we know what that forces that holds people together So what is it that holds atoms together? I mean you could use scientific language for it if you want, but I think we yeah, we could call it love and

That just as I've been describing how bringing in some of these teachings can shift our orientation to practice itself, I think that ultimately my view that what waking up really means is that we shift our perspective, period. We start to see the same things in new ways. And that's just me articulating that in my own inner language and sharing it with you and whoever else is listening. But it might change things for me or for you or for anyone else to take that up as a contemplation. A couple more questions before I let you go. The

A couple more questions before I let you go. The if, and it seems to be inarguably true, if women have been an important part of Buddhist history, but written out to a really lamentable extent, we can't fix that per se now, but what can we do to bring the female perspective into our own practices, into modern mindfulness and Buddhism? What are the positive steps we can all take given this sort of suboptimal circumstance? Yeah, great question. I mean, I think the first and maybe the most important in some way step is that we start to notice what you're describing. We start to notice for ourselves that there's

I talk about it as our world. We could say it as our practice is on tilt, that we live in a world in a culture which is hugely tilted toward the masculine and not toward the feminine. And this is very simple. If you think about masculine and feminine as energies, not as genders, so I would say all of us, male or female or any gender in between has a combination of masculine and feminine energies. So in traditional Chinese medicine we know that when these energies of yin and yang or masculine feminine go out of balance, we get sick. That's how it's described. And when we see that at a cultural level, which we're seeing in a massive scale right now,

we get sick. We have a cultural sickness, we have divisiveness, we have hatred, we have all of what we're seeing. And when things go on tilt in this way at an environmental level, we have a lot of what we see. So it's a way of understanding first what's wrong and giving ourselves a way to describe it. And then we can begin to pull in these, what are traditionally more feminine qualities

that go back to what I was describing at the beginning about the story of the Buddha. So in traditional Chinese medicine, we have language like hard and soft, light and dark, fast and slow, active and passive, penetrating and receptive. And you can hear in that language that we have a culture that prefers fast over slow, light over dark, active over passive, etc. And so we can begin to see in ourselves individually and in our communities where is that tilt and how could we bring ourselves into greater balance? And your story was a beautiful example of that,

right? The sort of shift from a solo, striving, suffering. That's a very masculine model in the description of what I'm describing and instead bring in something that is more communal, more connected, more gentle, more like that. So we might do that in our own practice, say, notice where we're pushing ourselves and where we might be more receptive, more gentle, or finding need for more nourishment, or more connection in our own practice, and then also in the structures of practice, in the ways that practice is passed on to us, the forms that have been passed down to us also have that tilt in them.

So that is, think really important and then you know there's the learning the stories about the women is also useful. But for me that that piece is really significant. So we have to see the bad news in order to correct it. So the first pieces we have to see, oh, we're on tilt here, aren't we? And that maybe is an explanation for some of the, you know, deep difficulty that we are admired in right now. Yeah, I'll say just for myself as somebody who's pretty strongly strongly constituted toward the stereotypical male, you know, and it's like, and many, many ways, you know, really steeped in the sort of myth of individual achievement and all that stuff. Bringing stereotypically feminine aspects into my own practice has been a huge revelation.

Yes. Well, and it's so beautiful what you're saying, Dan, because it's, you know, the, it's that great line from Bell Hooks, I think, says, patriarchy has no gender. Like patriarchy is that tilt, right? It's the ways in which a male lineage and masculine qualities have been dominant. That's all that that means. And it harms everybody regardless of gender. That tilt is harmful period. And it may harm different genders differently, but it's harmful. Yeah. Anything I missed? Well, I will just say that I hope that the stories and perspectives that are introduced here

are heard as an invitation, not really as a criticism or as a finding fault, but as a having all of us do our own reflection and see if we can find our way into a more balanced practice, a more balanced life, a more balanced world. That would be my hope from what I've been saying, you know. been saying, you know. Yeah, I think that's probably the gist of it. Well, I think to the extent that I'm capable, I'm picking up what you're putting down and appreciating it. In closing, I I always like to, or I often like to do what I semi facetiously call the plug zone. So can I get you to plug your book? Also, wherever you might appear on the interwebs,

for people who might want to listen to more of your talks or read any blog posts or articles or social media, where can we find all things Pamela Weiss? Well, it's easy because I have a website, which is PamelaWeiss.com. So that's the easiest place to go and the various classes and talks and so on that I do are all listed and or posted there. And the website is the upshot of my book which came out a few months ago called a Bigger Sky, Awakening a Fear's Feminine Buddhism.

And the book is speaks to many of the themes that we've been talking about today. And just so I don't disappoint anyone going looking for more traditional Dharma book, it is also a largely memoir and I wrote the book from my own voice and my own experience as a practitioner in these traditions for 30 plus years. And it felt to me that, I know it's one of the things I will say that I appreciated most about your book was that your first book, I should say, is that it was very personal. I found myself hungry for those more personal stories and in a way I wrote the book I wanted to read. So yeah, that would, I would, for any of you who are interested in these themes, please take peak. Thank you so much for doing this. Really excellent. Yeah, yeah, thank you.

Big thanks to Pamela, I really appreciate that. Before we go, let me just say thanks to the team who worked so hard to make this show a reality. Samuel Johns is our senior producer, DJ Cashmere is our producer, Jules Dodson is our AP, our sound designer is Matt Bolton from Ultraviolet Audio. Maria Wertail is our production coordinator. We get an enormous amount of incredibly helpful input from our TPH colleagues such as Jen Poehent,

Natoby Ben Rubin, and Liz Levin. And of course I would be remiss if I didn't thank my ABC News comrades Ryan Kessler and Josh Kohan. We'll see you all on Wednesday with a fresh episode. My guest is Laurie Santos. I mentioned her last week. We're going to be talking with Laurie who's a professor at Yale and a researcher in We'll see you all on Wednesday with a fresh episode. My guest is Lori Santos. I mentioned her last week. We're gonna be Talking with Lori who's a professor at Yale and a researcher in happiness host of the happiness lab podcast. We're gonna talk about all the ways that science suggests we can navigate the Dark and gloomy at least potentially dark and gloomy, winter months ahead of us with COVID, etc. So she is just a font of useful information that's coming up on Wednesday. We'll see you then.

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