This landmark presentation at last makes heard the centuries of the voices of Zen’s women. Through exploring the teachings and history of Zen’s female ancestors, from the time of the Buddha to ancient and modern female masters in China, Korea, and Japan, Grace Schireson offers us a view of a more balanced Dharma practice, one that is especially applicable to our complex lives, embedded as they are in webs of family relations and responsibilities, and the challenges of love and work.
Grace Jill Schireson (nee Rosenberg) was born in Los Angeles in 1946 and attended UC Berkeley from 1964-68. She married Peter Schireson in 1968 in a ceremony performed by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. She and Peter immigrated to Canada during the Vietnam war where they joined a spiritual commune and lived in a tent on Lasqueti Island and then Calvert Island and had two sons. After the Carter amnesty, Grace and Peter returned home and she resumed practice with Sojun Mel Weitsman of Berkeley Zen Center and completed a Doctorate in Clinical Psychology. She has worked with children, families and women's groups before retiring from clinical work to teach Dharma full time.
She moved to the family ranch in North Fork, California in 1995 where she started multiple Zen meditation groups in the foothills and California's Central Valley. She enjoyed horseback riding and cross country skiing until called to sit down and share the stories of Zen's female ancestors gathered from her trips to Japan to study with the gifted Zen master, Keido Fukushima Roshi of Kyoto's Tofukuji monastery. She has also co-founded the Shogaku Priests Ongoing Training Institute, a Zen priest training seminary, for teaching Zen priests and sangha leaders the skills necessary for leading Western sanghas. She lives with her husband of 40+ years, Peter Schireson, and enjoys (the never often enough) visits of children and grandchildren at her Zen retreat center, Empty Nest Zendo.
