Wilber, Ken
(1949- ) American Buddhist and transpersonal psychologist
Ken Wilbur, a popular American writer of books on spirituality, was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the son of an air force officer. While in school at Duke University he became interested in psychology. In graduate school he grabbed public attention with his first book, The Spectrum of Consciousness, an overview of the state of human consciousness that paid particular attention to the similarities and contrasts of Eastern and Western understandings. He pictured the human consciousness to waves of light that had stepped down to participate in time and space. From his interest in consciousness, he became a leading voice of the subdiscipline of transpersonal psychology and its quest for information about the higher states of conscious experience. Transper-sonal psychology places particular emphasis on the study of spirituality and such related issues as self-actualization and peak experiences.
Wilbur continued his exploration of consciousness, adding insights form various social sciences and religions. He became a Buddhist during this time, moving from Zen Buddhism to Tibetan meditation practice. He has suggested that scholars who seek to study consciousness should previously have experienced some of the spiritual states of consciousness.
In the late 1980s he made public his very conscious experience of his relationship with his wife, Treya, who was dying of cancer. in order to identify with her, he shaved his head and went through a very public expression of compassion. Two years after her death he published an account of the time in his book Grace and Grit (1991).
Through the 1980s he had become increasingly identified with the popular New Age movement, a movement he found to be both soaked in an uncritical antiintellectualism and holding views that conflicted with his own Buddhism. He became vocally critical of the movement and has continued to criticize it in more recent books.
Women in Buddhism
Women became involved with Buddhism even before Siddhartha Gautama of the Sakya clan became an awakened one known as the Buddha (563-483 b.c.e.). As the story goes, his mother, Mahamaya, dreamed that a white elephant merged with her side. Subsequently, nine months later she delivered Siddhartha from under her arm near her heart. He took seven steps and declared that this was his last lifetime. Seven days later his mother died. Her sister, Mahaprajapati Gotami, married Siddhartha’s father. After some years of questioning about why life was so hard Siddhartha left home on a pilgrimage when he was 29, leaving his wife and son behind.
It took six long and intensive years of study and meditation for him to realize enlightenment. He soon was able to develop a spiritual philosophy that would allow anyone to follow, the Eightfold Path. Years later when he was near his hometown teaching about taking refuge in the Three Jewels of Buddhism:—the Buddha, the Dharma (teachings), and sangha (order of monks)—a neighbor reported that Siddhartha was teaching in the town square. Quickly, his family ran to see him.
Buddha’s stepmother, Mahaprajapati, heard his sermon about the Four Auspicious sights, the Four Noble Truths, and the Eightfold Path. She decided to become a nun and attempted to gain Buddha’s permission to start a women’s order of the sangha. Neither the monks (bhiksu) nor Buddha himself favored women’s having a monastic type order. After repeated pleas, however, Buddha relented and allowed women to be ordained as nuns (bhiksuni), beginning with Mahaprajapati.
In instituting the order of nuns, Buddha asserted that women could attain arhat (enlightenment) but at the same time added eight restrictive rules that they had to follow. These rules were designed to maintain their subordinate relationship within the sangha and assure that no bhiksuni could ever have authority over any bhiksu. other rules forbade the bhiksu to abuse his authority. in the context of the times, the rules elevated the status of women, especially in recognizing their spiritual equality.
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT
Over the next centuries, Buddhism would spread as believers carried it along the caravan and sea routes to other countries, but also as a missionary religion, planted by the self-conscious efforts of dedicated leaders. The jump from India to Sri Lanka, for example, occurred through the efforts of King Asoka. His son, Mahinda, introduced Buddhism to Sri Lanka. Since the rules of the priesthood forbade Mahinda to ordain women, he asked Asoka to send his sister, Sanghamitta, and a group of nuns to Sri Lanka. Sanghamitta arrived accompanied by the nuns and with a branch of the Bodhi tree. From Sri Lanka, the Theravada Bhiksuni Sangha (order of nuns) spread eastward into Burma (Myanmar). However, the order was largely destroyed at the time of the Mongol attack on the Burmese kingdom of Pagan in the 13th century. Partly as a result, there are currently a few Buddhist nuns in Southeast Asia, and those there are generally detached from the main sangha community.
There have been major obstacles for women to overcome to be admitted to holy orders. They have to seek ordination where they can. Recently those in Sri Lanka after a long arduous struggle have been legitimized and are part of the organizational sangha (male monks). Since the third Sakyadhita Conference in 1993, many nuns have been encouraged by laywomen to pursue their quest. in April 2000, 22 Sri Lankan nuns and three Indonesian nuns traveled to the Foguangshan monastery in Taiwan to be ordained.
The possibility of the religious life for Chinese women emerged as Buddhism was transmitted northward from India. Beginning in the fourth century Buddhism made tremendous progress throughout both northern and southern China. In 317 Zhu Qingjian (Chu Ching Chien) (292-361) became the first Chinese woman to take the initiation as novice. Twenty-four other Chinese women who also wanted to live collectively joined her, and they founded a convent in Chang An, the Chinese capital at the time. However, it would not be until the year 434 that the Bhiksuni Sangha from Sri Lanka founded a formal order in China. Thus the Indian Sangha lineage survived in China and this particular lineage has never ceased to be. Today it continues in Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
The development of the sangha provided the first opportunity for Chinese women to leave roles as mother, daughter, and wife. It was also the case, unfortunately, that on those occasions that authorities discovered corruption among the secular political ranks, the women’s order was often the first to suffer reprisals.
Buddhism in China took a great step forward during the reign of Empress Wu Chao (c. 625705). Wu, a concubine of the emperor Tai Zong (r. 626-649), entered a Buddhist nunnery when he died. She later left the nunnery to become the wife of Tai Zong’s son and, eventually, the empress of China herself. However, she remembered her former sister nuns and as empress became a patron to the women of several Buddhist sects and encouraged them to assume roles equal to those of males in various rituals. She also worked to elevate the role of women in general and commissioned the biographies of several outstanding women so their contributions would not be forgotten.
From China, the order of nuns was transmitted to Korea and Japan. Three Japanese women— Zenshin, Zenso, and Eizen—were sent to the Korean kingdom of Paekche in 587 to study among the nuns there. Three years later they returned to Japan and instituted the process of ordination for Japanese nuns. The women’s orders have survived to the present, and especially in Korea women have assumed a more prominent role in leadership in the last generation.
Vajrayana Buddhism emerged among practitioners of Mahayana Buddhism in India in the fourth century c.e., probably in the northwest. This new perspective took some of its basic teachings from Tantric Hinduism. In these teachings sexual union serves as the model for overcoming duality in perceptions and achieving a realization of unity, described as an "adamantine union of light." Not all Tantra teachings involves physical practices; the goal is to learn from within yourself—on a subtle level—how to mix male and female energy for enlightenment.
Princess Laksminkara was an early outstanding female figure in Tantrism, the avenue to enlightenment within Vajrayana Buddhism. The semimythical princess lived in what is now Pakistan. As the story goes, the princess was to marry a prince. unfortunately, he hunted for sport, and her own belief in nonviolence caused her to leave him. Pretending lunacy, she lived for a period near a cremation ground. While there she experienced holy visions of Buddhas and bodhisattvas (the illumined souls who chose to reincarnate to help a suffering humanity). While there, the visionary Laksminkara attracted a substantial following of men and women from all castes. She taught them a form of sexual yoga as a way to bliss and enlightenment that transcended ordinary reality. Her students transmitted the extensive teachings all over the Indian subcontinent. She stressed that teachers remove the emotional blocks that prevented the student from obtaining nirvana.
As Buddhism was transmitted to Tibet, stories of figures such as Princess Laksminkara and a pantheon filled with female as well as male deities helped women to find a place in the tradition. Communities of nuns emerged throughout Tibet and most of the main male monastic groups had an affiliated order of nuns. Some nunneries were headed by women recognized as tulkus (emanations of a bodhisattva). Women were not, however, ordained as bhiksunis and were in general seen as less possessed of ritual powers.
Buddhism in the Modern West in moving into the modern West, Buddhism was forced to accommodate the changing attitudes toward women and their traditional assignments to second-class status. This changing context is no better symbolized that in the career of the Western Buddhist pioneer Alexandra David-Neel (1868-1969). David-Neel, an adventurer who pushed the envelope on women’s status even for the late 19th century, spent years exploring india, Tibet, China, and Japan. A citizen of France, a former opera singer, and learned in a number of languages including Tibetan, she translated many Buddhist texts into French. Her labors to enter Tibet spanned years. Foreigners were forbidden to enter Lhasa and she wanted to meet the Dalai Lama. Much of the early information about Tibetan Buddhism was gained through her works published in the late 1800s and early 1900s. She lived to be 101—working on Buddhist translations until shortly before her death.
Another prominent early female Western Buddhist was Mary Elizabeth Foster (d. 1930), a native of Hawaii. She had an accidental meeting with Angarika Dharmapala from Sri Lanka when his ship docked in Honolulu in 1893. He was homeward bound after being a dignitary and guest speaker for Buddhism at the World’s Parliament of Religions, in Chicago. Foster, already involved with Theosophy, managed to create a bridge encompassing the two belief systems. During the remaining years of her life she used her wealth to underwrite numerous Buddhist organizations throughout the islands.
As Buddhism was transmitted to the West in general and America in particular Zen Buddhism had an early significant role. Many people in the United States primarily discovered Buddhism first through Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki and his teaching of Zen, in the 1940s and 1950s. Among the early female leaders within the American Zen community, Ruth Fuller Everett Sasaki (18931967) was given significant help by Suzuki, who arranged for her early study at a Zen monastery in Japan. She would later become the head of the First Zen Institute of America.
Elsie Mitchell was an early American woman who traveled to Japan for study. She authored one of the early Zen Buddhist books by a female, Sun Buddhas, Moon Buddhas (1973). She later became involved with running the Cambridge Buddhist Association and emerged as the keeper of the archives. She also became the mentor of Maurine Stuart, who had left one Zen group over gender submission issues. Now the president of the Cambridge Association, Stuart credits Mitchell as her role model.
The order of Buddhist Contemplatives was founded by Jiyu-Kennett Roshi (1924-96). Initially, she studied Theravada Buddhism, but then in 1962 she moved to Malaysia seeking ordination in the Chan Buddhism tradition. Afterward, she traveled to Japan, where she became the personal disciple of the Very Reverend Chisan Koho Zenji, a Soto Zen master. In 1969, she returned to the United States and founded the Zen Mission Society in San Francisco. Operating amid a number of male roshis then in the West, Kennett Roshi attracted a number of students and in 1970 relocated to Mt. Shasta, where she founded a monastery and seminary. Those who completed their training, women and men, were ordained at Mt. Shasta, then founded monastic branches across North America and in England.
In spite of people like Sasaki and Kennett, women’s entry into positions of power in the larger Zen community occurred slowly. They were given some assistance by a few American male leaders such as Philip Kapleau (1909-2004) and Robert Baker Aitken (1917- ), who worked to transform antifemale attitudes in the many centers that grew out of their pioneering efforts. Anne Aitken and Robert Aitken, for example, cofounded the Diamond Zen Center in Hawaii, a center of the Sanbo Kyodan (Order of the Three Treasures). In the 1970s, the Diamond Zen Center became one of the places where the roles of women in American Buddhism, especially in light of the transfer of traditional patriarchal patterns from Japan, were identified and discussed, and advocacy for their elimination occurred.
Meanwhile, some of the women associated with Kapleau’s center in Rochester, New York, challenged a variety of the trappings of Zen practice and etiquette as inherently patriarchal. In 1981, unhappy with the state of change, Toni Packer and her allies withdrew from the Rochester Zen Center and started the Genesee Valley Zen Center. Her move raised a variety of issues about Zen practice related to women and the nature of authority. In the pilgrimage that later led from the Genesee Center to the Springwater Center that she now heads, Packer renounced her Zen credentials and adopted a new style of nonauthoritarian teachings.
A somewhat different trajectory was followed by Roshi Gessin Prabhasa Dharma (1931-99).
After a quarter-century of study and leadership, she resigned her post as head of an American Rinzai Zen center. She formed a liaison with the Vietnamese leadership of the International Buddhist Meditation Center in Los Angeles. She ultimately received the Dharma Mind Seal Transmission from the Venerable Thich Man Giac of the united Buddhist Churches of America. She subsequently founded the International Zen Institute of America, which now has affiliated centers in the United States and several European countries.
The Zen Center of Los Angeles and its founding teacher, Taizan Maezumi Roshi (1931-95), also became a vehicle for the rise of women in American Zen. Prior to his death, Maezumi Roshi elevated several women to leadership positions and Charlotte Joko Beck was named as one of his Dharma heirs, or designated successors. Today she leads the Ordinary Mind Zen School based in San Diego.
Along with Zen, in the 1960s and 1970s many Western Buddhists were attracted to Tibetan Buddhism. The largest of the Western Tibetan groups, Vajradhatu International, was founded by the Kagyu teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche (1939-87). Trungpa attracted many students with his unusual manner of teaching and his stress on the centrality of the teacher-and-student relationship. His goal was to strip away the ego of the student (in a manner similar to that advocated in Gestalt therapy). His teachings also advocated the trespassing of various sexual mores, which created a situation in which a number of his female disciples found themselves the victims of sexual abuse. As questions of male authority were raised in Zen in the 1980s, women from Tibetan traditions joined the conversations demanding changes.
In the summer of 1981, Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, an educational institution founded by Trungpa, became the site of the first conference on women in Buddhism. Women representatives of the three major traditions of American Buddhism—Tibetan, Japanese Zen, and Theravada—were invited to participate. The focus of the conferences were the numerous liaisons that had developed between male Buddhist leaders and their female students, and the unbalanced power relationship upon which such relationships were based. These conversations paralleled those that were also occurring in Protestant churches at the time.
The 1981-82 conferences were in part made possible by the women-only retreats that had emerged in the 1970s. Among the first to host such retreats was Ruth Denison, a Theravada meditation master and founder of Dhamma Dena, a retreat center near Joshua Tree, California. Considered somewhat unorthodox by some of her Theravada colleagues, she found support from the American-based vipassana groups such as the Insight Mediation Society in Massachusetts. In London, the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order have also hosted female-only retreats for many years.
The challenges to the subordinate role for women that had developed out of the secular gender role assignments in the Asian countries where Buddhism was dominant would remake Western Buddhism. Women, always present, found themselves rising to leadership roles of every kind, and the changing patterns within groups founded in the West would rebound, however slowly, on the groups founded by various Asian diaspora groups. The environment created by the Western context has provided opportunities for talented women to assume a host of new roles. Among the many symbols of the new roles available to women was the recognition of Jetsunma Ahkon Norbu Lhamo (1949- ) as a tulku and her formal enthronement by her male colleagues as a lineage holder in the Nyingma Tibetan tradition.
As indicative as any of the changing role of women in Buddhism has been the emergence of outstanding female Buddhist scholars, notable among them Rita Gross at the University of Wisconsin, Janet Gyatso at Amherst, and Karma Lek-she Tsomo at the University of San Diego. Lenore Friedman, the author of Meetings with Remarkable Women: Buddhist Teachers in America, set the standards for writing about Buddhist religious women. Such scholars have taken the lead in reexamining and recovering the achievements and accomplishments of Buddhist women through the centuries. initially finding only minimal support in their own communities, they are doing what Christian women are doing: providing their own interpretations to the age-old challenges of cultures and societies that support male authority. one result has been that Western Buddhist women have projected multiple ways to express their need and desire for spirituality, while building lines of communication and action across the many Buddhist traditions.
Won Buddhism
Won Buddhism is a relatively new form of Buddhism founded in Korea in the early 20th century. Its founder, Soe-tae San (1891-1943), attempted to strip Buddhism of its superstitious elements and reformulate it as a modern religion adaptable to present needs. Soe-tae San attempted to combine elements from both the Korean Son Buddhism (Zen Buddhism) tradition and the Pure Land Buddhism tradition. From the latter, the nembutsu is chanted to the bodhisattva Amida, though the Won centers are devoid of any statues representing Amida or other Buddhas. Adherents also engage in periods of meditation at the temple; however, the goal of practice is what is termed "timeless and placeless" meditation, that is, living in such a way as to see the Buddha, enlightenment, in all things. A step along the way is to realize one’s Buddha nature, one’s original consciousness, which is equivalent to the consciousness of all enlightened ones.
Won Buddhism has only one prime symbol and object of meditation—a black circle painted on a white field, as a symbolic representation of the cosmic body of Buddha, the dharmakaya. From his enlightened state, So-tae San wrote Chong-jon, the basic scriptural text used in the movement. At the same time respect is accorded the other sutras common to Korean Buddhism.
The founder of Won Buddhism was born into a peasant family on May 5, 1891, in Chunnam Province, Korea. As a child he had begun his search for truth, much of which involved his observing and analyzing the phenomenal world. After some 20 years of striving, he was granted an awakening that followed his entering a state of nirvana. He concluded that the common human problem of the modern age was enslavement to materialism, which entrapped people in samsara, the cycle of birth, death, and reincarnation. Won Buddhism attempts to facilitate people’s escaping samsara.
The founder is now known by his Dharma name, Soe-tae San, and his Dharma title, Tae-jongsa. After receiving enlightenment in 1915, Soe-tae San Taejongsa drew around him nine original disciples who wished to study Buddhism and engage in its practice. In 1924, they founded the Association for the Study of the Buddha-Dharma, which remained a rather small association through the Japanese occupation of Korea that only ended with Japan’s defeat in World War II. In the meantime, Soe-tae San died in 1943. However, as Won Buddhism, his teachings were propagated across Korea from 1946.
Soe-tae San had established the headquarters of his movement in Iksan City, where it remains. He was succeeded as head of the movement by Kyu Song (1900-62), one of his original disciples. He became known for the relief work he led and organized both after the Japanese occupation and after the Korean War. In 1962 he was succeeded by Taesan, Taego Kim (1916- ), the third prime master. Social service has been a hallmark of Won Buddhism as its has emerged, and it has established a number of charitable/welfare facilities for the homeless, orphans, the disabled, the elderly, the ill, and people otherwise neglected and forgotten by society.
Won Buddhism sponsors Won Kwang university and the Won Buddhist Graduate School in Korea, and the Won Institute of Graduate Studies recently opened in suburban Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (the United States).
Wonhyo
(617-686) Korean Buddhist pioneer
Buddhist life in Korea began in the fifth century, but its effective establishment across the peninsula occurred in the seventh century under the leadership of Wonhyo. Wonhyo was born into a noble family and grew up near Sorabal, the capital of the Silla Kingdom. His mature work was carried out in the years of the struggle to create a united Korea under the Silla ruler (completed in 668). He decided to become a Buddhist monk at the age of 15 and at the time of his ordination allowed his former home to be converted into a Buddhist temple. He would remain a monk for some three decades.
At one point, he decided it was necessary for him to go to China to study in some of the famous temples there. According to the story, when he was on his way to China with his younger colleague, Uisang (625-702), the pair was caught in a rainstorm. They took refuge in an underground shelter as darkness approached. During their stay in what turned out to be a mausoleum, Wonhyo arrived at a realization about the nature of the world as made of mind alone. When the mind is stilled, the differences in the world cease to matter. A tomb and a temple are all the same. With this realization, he no longer needed to go to China.
Abandoning his career as a monk in 661, he would spend the next decade contemplating his insight and writing a number of works expanding upon it. Then beginning in 676 he would devote a decade to popularizing Buddhism among the masses. His most famous book, the Commentary on the Awakening of Faith in Mahayana, explained his insight on the mind. Then, in his Treatise on Ten Approaches to Reconciliation of the Doctrinal Controversy, he turned to the problem of the divisions among a still minority faith on the Korean Peninsula. He argued that all religious positions have at least some validity and different perspectives find their reconciliation in the experience of the one Mind beyond all distinctions.
While articulating a mystical philosophy that could lead to inactivity, Wonhyo also refused to move in that direction. Rather, he called upon his contemporaries to give priority to their concern for all sentient being and orient themselves toward action. He suggested that human life was relatively short, the years should not be wasted, and efforts should be made to assist others in their appropriation of Buddhist truth.
Wonhyo continued to be active until his death at a cave temple near Kyongju, Korea, in 686. His own teachings prevented him from organizing a new school, and in the short term his contributions were less recognized than that of his own student Uisang. Some of his many writings were lost over the next centuries. However, as Korean Buddhists struggled with their own divisions and with the pressure of hostile rulers and foreign invaders, Wonhyo was rediscovered and his work recognized. At the end of the 11th century he was named the "National Preceptor of Harmonizing Controversies."
