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