Page 195 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

Dark Matter: Women Witnessing - December, 2015 Issue #3 - EXTINCTION / DEVOTION

AS:

We have been forced by circumstances to step out in a big way. My first teacher in Asia left the city

monasteries and went back to nature and lived in a dilapidated old temple in the south of Thailand. He

became a well-known teacher, attracting many Western disciples. I stayed with him for some time, and

then I came to Amaravati Monastery in England where I met Ayya Anandabodhi and we practiced in

this big monastic community for fifteen, sixteen years. And then, because women were not allowed to

have an equivalent ordination to the monks, though this was offered to women by the Buddha over

2500 years ago, in the end we decided to leave the community, though we liked it there and we had a

good training. But we wanted to have the full ordination because we were invited to come to America

and establish a training monastery, and when we were here on the West Coast, it became clear to us

that if you want to offer something to women in this part of the world it needs to be the real thing.

LW:

It’s extraordinary what you’ve done, and what you had to give up...

AS:

It was an unfolding, really. It came clear to me through study, having read about feminism, and studied

other things, the connection between the oppression of nature and the oppression of women, and then

it wasn’t a far stretch to feel connected to the environmental movement and that was what gave me the

extra kick to leave it all behind. So the ordination wasn’t the real motivator, only when I connected it

with the bigger whole, such as the environmental movement... only then did it become a big impetus.

LW:

It seems the environment has been part of your mission from the beginning.

AS:

Vandana Shiva has been a big influence in that respect, hearing her talks and reading her work seeing

so clearly the connection between the oppression of women and the environment. And then Thomas

Berry, who wrote that this whole universe is actually a spiritual scripture and increasingly through

evolution we are waking up to the oneness of it all and seeing ourselves as part of it. Those two have

very much influenced me. My Buddhist practice is very much situated within this framework.

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