Customer Reviews

A New Zen for Women

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As a novice student to Zen buddhism, I was intrigued by Perle Besserman's latest offering, "A New Zen For Women". The jacket listed the book as "An Insider's Perspective on Women and Zen" - so I assumed this book would give me a fair portrayal of women's roles in traditional Zen monasteries as well as insights on modern traditions. This book attempts to do just that but falls short of the goal due to Besserman's tightly wound, bitter and superior attitude.

The first chapter starts off with Besserman grumbling about her early education in an Orthodox Jewish yeshiva - where she was told that her 'natural function' was to marry, serve her husband and bear sons. She then quickly asserts that this never stood in the way of her learning that women were superior to men not only intellectually, but financially and emotionally. Besserman informs us that her own mother taught her that all men 'were really babies' and that women had to 'protect them from the knowledge of their weakness, manipulate them from behind the scenes and never openly compete with them' (pg. 3). Continuing on, Besserman then gives a brief glimpse into the corrupt men in spiritual positions who used women as slaves, maids or worse yet, as concubines. You quickly get the feeling that the author is not very fond of men and has a major axe to grind.

With this attitude, Besserman decides that she wants to 'see her original face' and marches off to her local Zen center in Jerusalem, cashmere sweater and falafel in hand, where she encounters her first Roshi and is casually dismissed. Three months later, the Roshi relents and allows her to attend a sesshin in London. Here, she discovers that the Roshi now acts like her father (equally obsessed with Discipline! pg. 18) and is not welcoming but distant. And harsh at times. And so starts her litany of complaints about the male Zen teachers she encounters. In this book, all of them are sexist and everyone treats her shabbily. She gets yelled at, forced to clean toilets and not a lot of respect. Always the victim, even the women are unfriendly (Pricilla Devon refuses to shake her hand and later, a woman named Linda doesn't help her with her bags at the airport) and not very sympathetic to her "plight".

All along you get the sneaking feeling that any 'ill treatment' that Besserman may have received is perhaps due to her boorish personality - which is at times whiny, at other times preachy, pushy and prideful. For example on page 130, she states: "I was really volatile in those days and pretty arrogant about just having come from a Japanese monastery, where I practiced "real Zen" with a Zen professional, not a layman." Ironically, this is the same monastery where she was 'treated badly' and was resident 'toilet cleaner' (she was supposedly made to clean them with her hands and not allowed to use a sponge).

After leaving the Japanese monastery, Besserman heads off to Hawaii to study with the venerable Robert Aitken, who she also quickly labels as a chauvinist. Although she meets her second husband, Manfred Steger at Diamond Sangha, they both get shown the door when Steger refused to receive transmission from Aitken and Besserman refuses to finish her koans (she later finishes them with Steger, whom she marries). Besserman laments that the internet Zen gossip "only" lists her as a "sometime student" of Aitken because she was a woman. The couple go off to start their own merry little zendo in New Jersey and create some sort of "democratic Zen" where teachers and students are 'equal' and at times it is "impossible to tell which is which". She calls this new model "WomenZen" (although she only mentions it in the beginning of the book and not at the end). Even though she calls it WomenZen, she then contradicts herself by saying that there shouldn't be separation of the sexes. What?! Then why on earth would you call it WomenZen and not something like PeopleZen? Contradictions such as this are rampant in this book, making Besserman sound as if she doesn't really want an equal situation after all, but simply a place where she can assert her own ego and work out her daddy issues.

Although there are many personal details here, Besserman leaves out others such as her role in starting the Soho Zendo in NY, where her first Roshi still teaches. She doesn't give many insights into how she was able to do all this traveling, all this study with different teachers (at the same time she was studying all this zen, she was also studying with a Rabbi and learning about Kabbalah), nor does she give much information on how her first marriage was truly affected by her traipsing around the world after her Roshi. We get no idea of why she left the Soho Zendo,nor what the Zen community thought of her. And although she talks about her father's impact, we get very little insight on her mother. It is not a well rounded story at all.

Although her writing style is decent and she has a story worth telling, I felt she spent too much time demonizing men and elevating women as far better teachers (her first "Zen Role Model" was a woman, of course). Perhaps the reason she was relegated to toilet cleaning and never made it as a Zen monk is because of this negative and self-important attitude. It appears as if she really didn't 'get' Zen after all. If this had been my first book about Zen, I would have been turned off altogether by the whole thing. Thankfully, authors like Charlotte Joko Beck and Brad Warner have guided my decision to practice without all the neurosis, anger and paranoia that would have been present had I used Besserman's book as my inroad.