Woman of Craft

“Many Buddhists have believed that the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara (enlightened hero of compassion) is beyond gender. According to the Lotus Sutra, this deity transforms the body and becomes a female, male, soldier, monk, god, or animal to save various beings from suffering. When he/she looked out into the world and saw the immense suffering of all beings, he/she shed tears of compassion….

…The eyes of Kanzeon see into every corner of Calcutta. The ears of Kanzeon hear all the voices if suffering, whether understandable to the human ear, or the voices of felled cedar and mahogany or struggling sturgeon who no longer make their way up Mother Volga to spawn. The hands of Kanzeon reach out in their many shapes, sizes, and colors to help all forms of beings. They reach out from the ground of understanding and love….It is understood that the craft of loving-kindness is the everyday face of wisdom and the ordinary hand of compassion. This wisdom face, this hand of mercy, is never realized alone, but always with and through others. The Buddhist perspective shows us that there is no personal enlightenment, that awakening occurs in the activity of loving relationship…

Sewing the kesa was one of the most feminine things that I’ve done as a Buddhist.” With every stitch, she repeated over and over, “I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the dharma, I take refuge in the sangha.”

“It gave me the insight that there is a fourth characteristic to the feminine besides the usual ‘maiden, mother, and crone.’ The fourth dimension of the feminine I call the ‘woman of craft.’
“It is understood that the craft of loving-kindness is the everyday face of wisdom and the ordinary kind of compassion. This wisdom face, this hand of mercy, is never realized alone but always with and through others. The Buddhist perspective shows us that there is no personal enlightenment, that awakening occurs in the activity of loving relationship.”

“Language is a place of creativity for me, So are gardening, painting, dancing, and singing. Now I feel that I want to sew more. Part of my nature is deeply embedded in the arts, in bringing the imaginal forth as a way of healing in the world.”
When the kesa was finished, Roshi Glassman made another suggestion as part of Halifax’s preparation for her ordination—that she cut her long, dark hair. “It’s a strong thing to do,” he told her in his quiet way.

But she couldn’t just lop it off in one fell swoop. Much of her identity as a woman had been bound up in that sensuous hair. The hair tied her to a past when she was a younger, wilder woman. As the date of her ordination approached, she cut her hair shorter and shorter. An inch, then a few more inches, exposing the nape of her neck, then a close buzz, leaving only a quarter inch of fuzz.

Halifax slips on the completed kesa. The voluminous folds conceal her slight frame, but every panel of fabric, every stitch, reveals who she is. She has a really, really big grin on her face.
“The kesa has been about bringing life and death together into an undivided reality—form and emptiness into just this moment,” she says, her brilliantly blue eyes twinkling with merriment. “It’s no big deal.”

Before her ordination, Joan and about thirty other people, including Roshi Glassman, sit in a circle and meditate. Their zafus are stumps and rocks in the middle of an abandoned asphalt school yard in Yonkers, New York. People carrying blaring boom boxes walk through the school yard. Low-rider cars rumble past a few feet away. Joan is practicing what she will do as a Soto priest—putting her altar in the street.

“I have been taking my altar to the street for many years,” she explains later. “I mean that in the sense of engaged spirituality. My work with the dying is one of my strongest ways to practice, of taking a plunge into the unknown. The ordination provides me with the opportunity for more advanced studies and for deeper collaboration with Roshi Glassman and his wife Jishu and their community.”

That collaboration includes developing a global network of communities with a spiritual basis that are dedicated to peacemaking. Such communities exist all over the world—Roshi Glassman’s Zen Community of New York, Halifax’s Upaya in Santa Fe, others in Poland, Switzerland, Italy, and on most every continent.

“We’re creating a way for these villages to link with each other and to begin to move more deeply with commitment and support in this work of service and practice,” Halifax says. “We’re assisting in the development of communities where people can go and take plunges into the unknown, do intensive work, put their altars in the street. I don’t see myself ever stopping that work.

“Probably the only thing that will change with my ordination is that my wardrobe will expand and I won’t have any hair,” she says with a laugh.

~ Stephen Foehr, Lion’s Roar