Adventures on the Path of Modern Day (Female) Guru Yoga > 자유게시판

Though great women peek through the Buddhist history books occasionally, think of the big spiritual names you know: The Dalai Lama, the 16th Karmapa, Namgyal Rinpoche, Sayadaw U Thila Wunta… I am focusing on keeping my radar on the Lama, like a field of awareness. My Lama field radar says: Time to move! They have known each other a long time. All the floats display treasures that have been cared for over many centuries. I follow Sensei around the building, the skin of our bare feet kissing the dark wood floors, smooth from centuries of foot service. They do it as it has been done by other men, for centuries. For 1,150 years-since the year 869, a year of terrible epidemic-people have come together in the height of the summer, July, to ward off "evil spirits," disease, and pestilence, and to nurture the wholesome and positive, a.k.a., health-spiritual and physical. In July, I travelled across the globe from Clear Sky in Canada to be an attendant to Catherine Sensei in Kyoto, Japan.

Catherine Sensei was not teaching formally. We stop twenty feet away from the towering structure and I set up the camera while Sensei takes in the surroundings. I was still cutting it close, getting the camera gear ready just in time to get out the 7am door… There are no lights, but camera and action happen next. She leads us through the broad, pebble sculpted walkways to Zuihoin, a sub-temple built in 1535. We have an appointment with her friend, the abbott there. And, to have compassion for all involved in the messy game of waking up. She’s reintroducing the importance of the festival’s spiritual foundations, and the community of people who have kept it going for more than a millennia. There are 34 floats in the festival’s total procession. The attendant, an earnest faced young Japanese-American whose mother, a tea ceremony teacher, has sent him there to learn, shows us to the tea room to wait. She shows me the ancient paintings, black ink on the washi paper walls, some faded, some slightly torn.

I soon learn that these we are using today are Shigaraki ceramics, renowned as one of Japan’s six ancient kilns. "Hi, we are at Hōka Boko. Yet, in the world of human form, physicality, conceptions, you are also all the time something of a mirage to this person. The great boon of the seeking human consciousness. Often these treasures were acquired via the wealth and power of kimono merchants, whose prosperity during certain periods financed a great deal of the festival. No big deal! My body remembers the exacting postures of the formal tea ceremony I’d once attended in Tokyo. She says hello to some smiling old acquaintances, some who helped her with her research and book. Sensei speaks, eyes smiling. Sensei shares: She needs me to be even sharper. I met Sensei at the airport in Tokyo, where we got straight into a Shinkansen bullet train to Kyoto and into Gion Matsuri mode. It was time for the Gion Matsuri festival, which she has been documenting and writing about for 30 years.

We wind our way through the narrow streets, cicadas chirping, to the first Gion Festival float of the morning. Alongside the tea, we taste the intense flavours of sweet, then salty, first with a delicate sweet bean dessert, a sailboat on a summer lake, and then some temple-made fermented black soybeans, sharp like an axe slicing winter kindling. First thing after arriving in Japan, I shopped for presentable summer clothes-another years-long area of growth Sensei has beckoned me into. When I came into this Dharma lineage about 18 years ago, Qapel (then Doug Sensei) was the principal Teacher. I observed Sensei being Dharma attendant, consort, and Teacher over many years. I wouldn’t have been caught dead with a baby-pink backpack 20 years ago. Through all of this, I see more clearly all the ways I have dismissed my female Teacher and the women in my life. No more black! More colour! I feel fresher, more cohesive. Some ping-pong balls are more obvious and some are less conscious; some are painted bright yellow, and some are like ghosts.

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