This week, Roshi chose to focus on the topic of diversity within Soto Zen.  He began with updates on the “Ananda Project,” an initiative aimed at bringing Zen practice to neurodivergent communities. The name Ananda was chosen in honor of the historical Ananda, renowned for his extraordinary memory and for reciting much of the Buddha’s teachings at the First Buddhist Council. The spirit of the project, Roshi explained, is to create a space where people with diverse abilities and talents can truly flourish in practice.

Reflecting on special talents led Roshi to a second topic: the underrepresentation of female ancestors within the Soto Zen tradition. He noted ongoing efforts within the Soto Zen organization to address this imbalance, including women-only retreats and deeper study of writings by female teachers. Roshi pointed out that most of the koans we study were written by Chinese men for students drawn from clerical, royal, or military classes. Yet there are important examples of koans authored and practiced by women. One such collection is Mirror Zen, a set of thirty koans and poems preserved at the Tokeiji convent-temple in Kamakura, Japan. An example reads:

“A mirror that does not cloud and needs no polishing — set it before the teacher now.”

Roshi added that many koans written by women were later taken up by the samurai class, which underscores the point that insight—not status, gender, or background—is the true mark of a teacher.

At this point, Roshi stopped to consider whether Soto Zen should explicitly emphasize women teachers and ancestors. Isn’t it enough, he asked, simply to study all enlightened ancestors without regard to their “physical aggregates”? Could our efforts to correct historical imbalances unintentionally allow modern dualistic thinking to influence a tradition thousands of years old?

As he often does, Roshi approached this question with skillfulness. The goal is not to divide ancestors into male or female, Asian or American, but to employ every possible skillful means to help all sentient beings awaken. From this perspective, it would be unskillful to leave any body of teachings unexplored. Roshi emphasized how difficult Dharma transmission becomes when there are barriers of language or perspective. This is precisely why all voices matter.

He reminded us that historically, Zen practice was largely limited to men of the military, royal, or clerical classes. His lineage worked to shift this by opening practice to a broader range of people in Japan. This began with Harada Roshi making training accessible to a wider population, and continued with Roshi’s own teacher, Ban Roshi, who opened practice to foreign students. Without this widening of the tradition, Roshi noted, he himself would never have received his deep training in Japan.

Roshi wrapped up by returning to the themes of skillful means represented in both the Ananda Project and the renewed attention to female ancestors within Soto Zen. As a contemporary example, he encouraged us to explore The Hidden Lamp, a 2013 koan collection edited by Zenshin Florence Caplow and Reigetsu Susan Moon. The book is significant because it intentionally centers stories of women that were often overlooked or obscured in classic collections like the Blue Cliff Record and the Gateless Gate.