Hi friends, please don’t be stressed out over the idea that the bhikkhunis are divided and feuding over The FFW situation, stabbing each other with verbal daggers or with icy silence. It’s not like that!
In case anyone is arriving new to these conversations, I’m the person who posted the essay that drew attention to the non-authenticity of Matty Weingast’s The First Free Women: Poems of the Early Buddhist Nuns. Matty has described his “translation” processs as taking meditative inspiration from each ancient poem of the women’s Therīgāthā collection and replacing it with a new poem of his own composition. At the time I posted my expose, his book was selling at high volume as a fresh new translation of Therīgāthā scripture, catalogued as a translation in libraries, embraced in university gender studies programs, and studied as scripture by lay Buddhist groups.
My relationship with the Aloka Vihara leaders - who worked extensively with the manuscript and promoted the book - reaches back nearly 25 years. Soon after the author, Matty, expressed defiance on a Zoom call (in response to my reasonable polite inquiry, or to my rude confrontation, depending on who you ask), Ayya Anandabodhi and I met together. It was just the 2 of us, on Zoom, right before Ayya Anandabodhi entered into the quiet months of Aloka Vihara’s winter retreat.
We engaged in some lively debate for awhile - inevitable with me on a call, heh - but we sorted through what happened, made personal apologies, and settled into the warm, caring friendship that we have known for so long. Our intended brief call stretched into 2 hours, ending only when I had to sign off to give a teaching. My last comment on the call was encouraging her to completely forget about all this in order to enjoy her retreat.
Since then, she & I have continued to collaborate by email on a longstanding shared interest. During the AV winter retreat, I covered a minor online duty of Ayya Anandabodhi’s, so that Ayya Santacitta and others on retreat at AV would not be disturbed by it. They’d still do the same sort of kindness for me, I feel sure.
Only now, after some feedback, has it occured to me that some people need to hear of our overarching unity as Bhikkhuni Sangha; in fact, perhaps a bit of the distress and conflict aversion expressed on this topic may have come from misperceiving a stance of enmity between nuns.
To be clear, I hold no personal hard feelings towards the Aloka Vihara community over The FFW, and trust they feel the same way towards me.
A concession that I haven’t yet made, but would like to make here, is about casting aspersions on Matty’s intentions. His actions [edit: and impacts on others] have checked off pretty much every box that would make me suspect [edit: someone to be a manipulator with no conscience], and hey - walks like a duck, etc. But characterizing him in suspicious or demeaning ways hurts my friends at Aloka Vihara. Knowing this, I apologize and will stop assigning motivations to him.
While the recent posts by Aloka Vihara leaders reflect an appreciable shift towards the position of critics of the book, we don’t yet see eye to eye. So long as they continue to approve reading aloud a poem composed in the 21st century and saying “These are the words of Rohini Theri” - or of the Buddha’s aunt Mahapajapati, or any of all the rest of the enlightened Elders whose words were replaced by Matty’s - the arahants will continue to be misrepresented. That’s harmful, and it’s bad kamma, and I want better for my friends and the world than that.
Yet, fortunately, we don’t have to see eye to eye to keep our warm and caring connection as Sangha, which we continue to do.
[Edited on request.]