Home › Magazine › Spring 2001 › Of Samurai and Sisterhood

Of Samurai and Sisterhood

Three members of the Tricycle staff talk to feminist, Buddhist, and philosophy professor Nancy Baker about practice and patriarchy.

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Nancy Baker Sensei, a professor of philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College for the last twenty-seven years, is also a dharma successor of Bernie Glassman Roshi and the founder of No Traces Zendo in New York. Here she discusses the intersections of Buddhism and feminism with three young women from Tricycle: Alexis Rubenstein, who graduated from Columbia University in 1997 with an emphasis on Tibetan religion and language; Tammy Greenstein, a musician who began Zen practice in 1998 at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in California; and Christine Dzialo, a student of Khyongla Rato Rinpoche at The Tibet Center in New York City.

© Marin BuschelAlexis: Many of us came into Buddhism at the same time that we came into feminism, at least the three of us, and so we were wondering for you, how these two isms, Buddhism and feminism, are complementary and how are they contradictory? I find them complementary, and it’s probably because my personal and academic interests in feminism have been about the self and the formation of gender. I teach a course called “The Construction and Deconstruction of Gender,” which almost sounds like a course on Buddhism—in both cases it seems to me that the practice is about letting go of the labels and identities that limit us. I’m not sure I have ever found feminism and Buddhism in conflict. Because I see any feminist issue—like any issue ever, anywhere in the universe—as a Zen issue.

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