Mihiri Tillakaratne (associate editor at Lion’s Roar): What Buddhist women have influenced your work or spiritual path?
Lama Karma Chotso (founder of Open Awareness Buddhist Center in Florida): Khandro Rinpoche is one of the best Tibetan Buddhist teachers I’ve ever heard. Her level of knowledge and realization is incredible.
Over forty years ago, when women in the U.S. started practicing Tibetan Buddhism, there were virtually no examples of women practitioners for us to follow. My first teacher was Kalu Rinpoche, who was the holder of the Shangpa Kagyu lineage of Niguma, a tenth- or eleventh-century realized yogini born to a Brahman family in Kashmir. Teachers in the Shangpa Kagyu lineage would teach about Niguma and the female buddha Tara, but still, the teachings came from men. While that was difficult in one way, in another, it was freeing, because we women didn’t have to copy a certain way of being.
Arisika Razak (former chair of the Women’s Spirituality Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies): As someone who defines themselves as spiritual, not religious, I feel I belong to a lineage of nondenominational African American women healers. When Black women were denied the pulpit in the 1800s, many went into the forest and heard the voice of spirit. When they came back, they ministered to the people. I’m also of the lineage of women like Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, who integrated faith in God with the liberation of the people and leadership by women.
Some women whose work inspires me are Vimalasara Mason-John, who brings African ritual and vernacular practices to the forefront; Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, author of The Shamanic Bones of Zen; Ruth King, author of Mindful of Race; and Rima Vesely-Flad, author of Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition.
Sharon Suh (president of Sakyadhita, the international association of Buddhist women): One of the people that influenced me to accept myself in my Buddhist identity was bell hooks. As an Asian American, I’d always felt I didn’t meditate enough to be considered a Buddhist. Many folks in Asian American communities struggle with this authenticity anxiety, because we’re modeling ourselves off an American modernist view of Buddhism: “Oh, we should be meditating all the time, and that’s the most important thing.”
About twenty years ago, I was on a panel at Smith College with bell hooks and the Venerable Karma
