Book Review: The Hidden Lamp

Pat Simmons reviews an anthology of and about awakened women.

Years ago I was in a koan retreat, working dutifully away at my koan, which featured an encounter between four monks and their teacher. An idea came to me: supposing I were to assume that the monks’ Chinese names were in fact women’s names, that – shock horror! – the ‘monks’ were women. Why should their teacher, indeed, not be a woman!

As I made this mental adjustment and started pretending to myself that all five people were women, the effect was quite startling. First of all, I saw colour flooding my image of a scene which I had been seeing in black and white. No, I do not think men are at all colourless, but this was my instinctive response to the transformation I had created in my mind.

And then I found myself taking into myself these four monks (three foolish, one wise) and their teacher, in a way that had not been possible up to that moment. I recognised in myself the folly of the three clever clever speakers, the sensible, (slightly grumpy) down-to-earth quality of the wise one, and the authority of the teacher. At last I could really identify with the koan and work with it. It had become me.

Male and female – and all points in between – are only attributes, of course, and anyway most of us can make some sort of imaginative leap into a different gender. Nevertheless, women are half the human race and they have been important members of the sangha from the beginning. Any tradition which ignores their experiences and insights impoverishes itself. And there were no women in any of the koans I had been given to choose from.

But the times they are a-changing. On my most recent koan retreat I could choose from a fair number of koans featuring women. And ‘The Hidden Lamp’, published just over a year ago, is also part of that change.

Its structure is simple: 100 koan-type ‘stories from twenty-five centuries of awakened women’ (to quote the book’s subtitle), with commentaries on them by modern women Buddhists from around the world, including Western Chan retreat leader and teacher, Hilary Richards.

These awakened, or awakening, women are a lively and varied lot: wives, mothers, daughters, widows. Plenty of nuns, as you might expect, but servants, traders, bathhouse keepers, teashop owners, slaves, herdswomen, fishwives, queens, sex workers and doughnut makers as well. They find enlightenment when their cooking catches fire, or the bottom falls out of their water bucket, or they are washing up or being forced to start looking for a husband. They crack jokes, they grieve, they feed milk to the Buddha.

One figure occurs again and again, in stories from many countries and many centuries: that of the ‘old woman’. As often as not she is nameless and of low social status, but she has won through and become a powerful figure, full of simple and profound insight and not afraid to criticise the supposedly wise: ‘He’s a good monk, but off he goes just like the others,’ observes one, of a succession of holy men. Deshan is so humbled by the penetrating questions of another that he burns all the notes and commentaries he has written on the Diamond Sutra.

Many of the other women are also willing to challenge those in authority over them, often in quite startlingly bawdy and explicit language. Nuns in particular seem often to face a hostility from monks that expresses itself in crudely sexual language – and they give as good as they get. They know that, even with many wiser men, their sexuality is experienced as a challenge, and this in turn is a challenge to them. They face it unashamed. Miaozong strips naked to face Wanan, informs him that all Buddhas are born from women (she puts it less politely than this) and then dismisses him with a majestic ‘I have met you, Senior Monk. The interview is over.’

It is not always that ‘easy’, of course. Ryon Genso has to scar her face with a hot iron before Hakuo will accept her as a disciple, and Changjingjin sees herself initially as ‘a woman with the three obstructions and five difficulties and a body that is not free’. Sariputra tells the naga princess that she cannot achieve enlightenment because she has ‘the body and obstacles of a woman’. 

Over and over again, however, the koans make the same point: that ‘each and every person has the sky over their head; each and every one has the earth under their feet,’ that ‘at the time of being free from delusion and realising the truth, there is no difference between men and women.’

‘It is a great relief to finally have access to this rich material’, says Norman Fischer in his Foreword to the book. The editors, Florence Caplow and Susan Moon, write of having to read through hundreds of koans and similar stories, just to find the one that even mentions a woman. I found it exhilarating just to read these stories, and moving to read the insightful, often very personal, commentaries by modern women.

Norman Fischer also points out that we have all – men and women – been short-changed by the over-emphasis in Buddhism on the experiences of men. Traditional male-oriented koans, he thinks, represent an almost exclusively ‘grasping’ way of teaching: withholding wisdom and leaving the seeker to struggle (heroically) alone. He sees the koans in this book as belonging far more to the ‘granting’ way: ‘the kindly way of clear and helpful teaching, in which even your confusion and suffering is part of the path’. This may be a generalisation (some of those old women can be pretty enigmatic…) but certainly I found a lightness and grace in many of the stories which I experience as both attractive and helpful.

‘Never before in the history of Buddhism,’ write the editors, ‘have women been so prominent or empowered as Buddhist teachers, nor, until now, have scholars and translators brought to the West so many of the old stories about women. So finally the lamp can be uncovered, for the benefit of everyone.’ 

The Hidden Lamp: Stories from Twenty-Five Centuries of Awakened Women, ed Florence Caplow and Susan Moon, 2013, Wisdom Publications.