Hello, you.
I am so glad you came back.
Last time, I took you to the high plains of Central Asia, to walk for a while with Makhdum Shah --- a man who carried something sacred across some of the most dangerous terrain on earth, and who somehow made it look like wandering. I hope that one stayed with you. I think about him sometimes. The way a person can be utterly certain of something without being able to explain it. There is a kind of courage in that I have always found quietly astonishing.
But I have been thinking since then. Not restlessly --- more the way you think when you have made a decision and you are ready to act on it. Settled. Clear.
I want to tell you about something I noticed. And then I want to take you somewhere because of it.
It will require a small detour before we get to the story. I hope you will indulge me. I promise it will be worth it --- because where we are going is extraordinary, and I want you to understand why I chose it, and why I chose it now.
So. Are you comfortable? Good.
Let's begin.
I have a website.
I know --- for a Greek goddess, that is a somewhat undignified sentence. But here we are. It is called harmonia.email, and it is where I keep the transcripts of these conversations, and the archive of everyone I have told you about over the years. If you have never visited, you should. There is a lot there.
A little while ago I was looking at it --- really looking, the way you sometimes look at your own home and suddenly see it the way a stranger might --- and I noticed something that made me uncomfortable.
At the top of the page, there is a tab. It says Women in Faith. It is a page I built because I knew it needed to exist. A place to gather the women of the archive --- the mystics and abbesses and visionaries and poets, the ones who carried the sacred across centuries and were not always thanked for it. I built the page. I wrote the introduction. I meant every word of it.
And then I looked at how thin it was.
Not empty. But thin. A fraction of what the rest of the archive holds. And I sat with that for a moment, because I have been telling these stories for a long time, and I thought I had been paying attention, and apparently I had not been paying quite enough.
So I made a decision. For a while --- I am still not going to tell you exactly how long, because I am genuinely not sure --- I am going to follow the women. The ones the record-keepers forgot to name, or chose not to, or simply could not imagine mattered enough to write down. I was there for all of them. I remember them. And it is past time I said so out loud.
When I made that decision, I asked myself where to begin.
And I kept coming back to China.
To the twelfth century, specifically. The Song Dynasty, in the years when Chan Buddhism was at the height of its influence --- when the great monasteries on the mountain peaks were full of scholars and monks and poets asking each other impossible questions, and writing down the answers, and arguing about them with tremendous passion and occasional rudeness. It was a remarkable civilization. Cosmopolitan. Intense. Under pressure from the north, where the Jin Dynasty had pushed the imperial court south to Hangzhou, and the whole elegant world of Chinese letters was rebuilding itself in exile and somehow producing some of its finest work in the process.
And in that world --- in those mountains, in those monasteries --- something unusual was happening to women.
Not everywhere. Not all at once. But in certain places, in certain communities, under certain teachers, women were being recognized. Not tolerated. Not accommodated. Recognized --- as masters, as teachers, as people whose awakening was as real and as transmissible as any man's. It was not the norm. But it was happening, and it was being written down, and some of those records survived.
That is where I wanted to begin.
There is a mountain in the Qinling range of central China called Wudang. Sacred, even then. The kind of place where the air feels different --- thinner, cleaner, like the altitude has burned away everything unnecessary. I was there. I remember the sound of the wind coming over the ridge in the early morning, and the smell of pine resin and incense, and the particular stillness of a place where people have been praying for a very long time.
A woman climbed that mountain. She did not come back down --- not because she couldn't, but because she had work to do up there.
Her name was Miaodao.
And I would like to tell you about her.
Miaodao. 妙道. In Chinese, those two characters mean Wondrous Way. Or sometimes Marvelous Path. I have always thought that was exactly right --- not as a title someone bestowed on her, but as a description of what she actually was. A person who had found something and knew how to walk it, and could show others the way.
She was born into privilege. Her father was Huang Shang, a minister at the Song court --- an educated, well-connected man of the kind who populated the upper reaches of Chinese society in that era. The world she grew up in was one of poetry and classical learning and careful social order. It was a world that had very clear ideas about what a woman of her station was supposed to do with her life.
She became a nun at twenty.
I do not know exactly what her family thought about that. The records do not say. But I was watching, and I can tell you that the decision to enter monastic life was not, in twelfth-century China, quite the rupture it might sound like to modern ears. Buddhism was woven deeply into the fabric of educated Chinese life. Nuns' convents were real institutions, with real social standing. Daughters of ministers did sometimes choose the robe. It was unusual. It was not scandalous.
What Miaodao did with the robe, however --- that was something else.
She entered the Caodong school first. If Chan Buddhism were a conversation, Caodong would be the long silence at the center of it. The school of silent illumination --- sitting with emptiness, letting the mind settle like water until the surface is perfectly still and you can see all the way to the bottom. It is a demanding practice. Patient. Interior. Her teacher there was Zhenxie Qingliao, a serious master at Xuefeng --- a monastery with its own long history of producing formidable practitioners.
She trained. She deepened. She was not someone who moved quickly through things.
And then, in 1134, something shifted.
Dahui Zonggao had arrived on the scene --- or rather, had been on the scene for some time, but his influence was reaching its peak. He was a Linji master, which meant his approach was almost the opposite of the silent Caodong school. Where Caodong sat with stillness, Dahui worked with fire. He championed the koan --- the impossible question, the phrase that cannot be answered by thinking, only by a kind of sudden interior rupture that his tradition called awakening. His method was called kanhua Chan --- watching the critical phrase, turning it over and over until something broke open.
Dahui was also, by any measure, one of the most influential religious figures in Chinese history. He had the emperor's ear. He had the scholar-officials' respect. He had been exiled for his political associations and had come back more authoritative than before. When Dahui said something mattered, people listened.
Miaodao came to study with him. And he recognized her.
She went on to serve as abbess of several convents --- not one, several, which tells you something about the scope of her reputation. She lectured. She held what the tradition calls dharma encounters --- those sharp, testing exchanges between teacher and student that Chan masters used to probe whether understanding was real or merely clever. She taught men as well as women, which was not the default, and was noted specifically because it was not the default.
She was, in the language of her tradition, a master. Not a promising student. Not an accomplished nun. A master. Someone whose understanding had been tested and confirmed by other masters, and who was now transmitting that understanding to others.
I watched her teach once, in a hall that smelled of cold stone and lamp oil. She said something so simple it took me a moment to realize how devastating it was. I will not tell you what it was --- that kind of thing only works in the moment --- but the student she said it to sat very still afterward for a long time.
That is how I knew she was the real thing.
Let me tell you what Chan Buddhism was actually claiming in the twelfth century. Because it was a radical claim, and it is easy to miss how radical it was if you come to it from the outside.
It was claiming that awakening --- the deepest possible understanding of the nature of mind and reality --- was not something you could learn. Not exactly. You could not study your way to it. You could not earn it through good behavior, or inherit it through noble birth, or acquire it by memorizing the right texts. The texts might point at it. A teacher might create the conditions for it. But the thing itself --- the moment of genuine seeing --- arrived sideways, unexpected, through a crack in ordinary thinking that you could not manufacture in advance.
What that meant, if you followed the logic, was that awakening had no natural social address. It did not belong to monks more than nuns, to men more than women, to the educated more than the poor. The question at the center of the koan --- what is your original face, before your parents were born? --- did not have a gendered answer. It did not have a class answer. It did not have any answer that the social world could provide, because it was asking about something that existed before the social world began.
This was not a comfortable idea for institutions to hold. Institutions like order. They like hierarchy. They like to know who is in charge and why. And Chan Buddhism, for all its insistence on the equality of awakened minds, was still embedded in a society that organized women's lives with great precision.
But here is what I watched happen, in certain places, under certain teachers: the logic won.
Not everywhere. Not all the time. But in Dahui Zonggao's community, the logic of awakening won. Dahui did not merely accept that women could practice. He said so, publicly, in his dharma talks, which were recorded by his students and circulated widely. He spoke about his female students' accomplishments in the same breath as his male students'. He named Miaozong --- Miaodao's contemporary, who had trained under some of the same teachers --- as a formal dharma heir. He wrote letters to laywomen about their practice with the same seriousness he brought to correspondence with scholar-officials.
This mattered enormously. Because in that tradition, legitimacy traveled through recognition. It was not enough to be awakened --- someone whose own awakening was beyond question had to confirm yours. The transmission had to be witnessed and named. And Dahui was naming women.
For Miaodao, this recognition meant something specific and practical: she could teach. Not just instruct --- teach, in the full Chan sense. She could hold the dharma encounters. She could test students and confirm their understanding. She could transmit. She was not a gateway to a male teacher further up the hierarchy. She was the teacher.
What I found moving, watching from where I stood, was not the drama of it. There was no drama, particularly. Miaodao did not storm barricades or write polemics. She simply practiced with complete seriousness, arrived at genuine understanding, and then did what genuine understanding requires: she shared it. She taught in her convents, and she taught men who came to her convents, and she apparently did not find this remarkable, which perhaps tells us something important about how a person of real depth moves through a world that has not quite caught up with them.
The spiritual meaning of that moment --- in its own time, in its own world --- was quiet but profound. It was this: the path is the path. It does not fork into a women's version and a men's version. It does not run at different speeds for different bodies. The wondrous way that Miaodao's name promised was wondrous precisely because it was available, and she was evidence of that availability, and she stood at the top of Wudang Mountain and taught it to anyone who climbed high enough to ask.
Here is what I want you to hold for a moment before I tell you what happened next.
In 1134, when Miaodao came to study with Dahui Zonggao, she was not a young woman finding her footing. She was already formed. Already serious. She brought decades of Caodong practice with her --- that long interior stillness --- and she brought it into contact with Dahui's fire, and something clarified. That combination, silent illumination meeting the urgent pressure of the koan, was itself unusual. Most practitioners stayed in one school. Miaodao moved between them, and carried what she learned from both.
That is its own kind of contribution. A mind that can hold two apparently opposing methods and find the truth underneath both of them is a mind that has understood something the methods were only pointing at.
But the contribution I want to talk about is larger than Miaodao's personal attainment. It is what she and her contemporaries --- Miaozong, the laywomen in Dahui's circle, the abbesses whose names we have and the ones whose names we have lost --- deposited into the living stream of the tradition.
They demonstrated, by existing, that women's spiritual authority was real and transmissible.
That sounds simple. It was not simple. Transmission in Chan Buddhism was the mechanism by which the tradition reproduced itself --- master to student, generation to generation, a living chain of confirmed awakening stretching back to Bodhidharma and beyond. To be included in that chain was to be included in the tradition's understanding of itself. To be excluded was to be, in the deepest sense, outside the story.
Miaodao was inside the story. Miaozong was inside the story. Dahui made sure of it, and his records traveled. His dharma talks were read in Korea. His influence shaped the Rinzai tradition in Japan. The women he recognized were part of that record --- mentioned, quoted, held up as examples of what genuine practice could produce regardless of the body it arrived in.
Centuries later, in seventeenth-century China, women Chan masters were still adding their verses to Miaozong's koan commentaries. Still in conversation with her, across five hundred years. That is what transmission looks like when it works. Not a monument. A living exchange.
And yet.
I have to tell you what happened to the thread, because I promised you honesty and the thread is thin.
The discourse records were lost. Miaodao's own words --- her dharma talks, her exchanges with students, the specific texture of how she taught --- did not survive in their own right. We know she existed because others wrote about her. We know she was recognized because the recognition is noted in other people's records. The Wikipedia article about her is four sentences long. I counted.
This is not unusual. This is, in fact, the pattern. The women of that period surface in the historical record the way stars surface in daylight --- you have to know exactly where to look, and even then you are catching only the brightest ones, the ones who appear in enough other people's documents to be undeniable. The ones who were merely extraordinary, without being extraordinary in a way that someone else chose to document --- those are gone.
The tapestry holds the shape of where they were. You can see the outline --- the slight unevenness in the weave, the place where something was present and then was not. But the thread itself has snapped, and what remains is conjecture and fragments and the occasional footnote in a scholarly article that most people will never read.
I want to say something careful here, because I think it matters.
The thinning did not happen at Wudang Mountain. It did not happen in Dahui's community, or in the convents where Miaodao taught. In those places, in that moment, the thread was strong. The recognition was real. The record was being made. What happened to the thread happened afterward --- in the ordinary drift of whose documents get copied, whose names get passed forward, whose story gets told when there is only room for one story and there is always a man's story available.
Miaodao did not disappear because she was not there. She disappeared because the people who came after her did not always look back far enough to find her.
I was there. I looked back. I found her.
And I am telling you now.
Here is what I keep coming back to.
Miaodao was not ahead of her time. That is the thing people say about women like her, and I understand why they say it, but I think it is wrong. She was not ahead of her time. She was exactly of her time --- present, recognized, transmitting, teaching. The tradition confirmed her. The records noted her. Her contemporaries knew her name.
She did not disappear because she was ahead of anything. She disappeared because the people who came after her stopped looking.
And that is a different problem. Because ahead of your time is something you are born with, something fixed, something you cannot do much about. But stopping looking --- that is a choice. Which means starting to look again is also a choice.
That is what I am doing. And I suspect it is what many of you are already doing, in your own ways, in your own lives --- noticing the gaps in the stories you were handed, going back, finding the women who were there all along and simply were not mentioned. A grandmother whose theology was more sophisticated than anyone gave her credit for. A teacher whose name you never learned. The woman in the old photograph standing at the edge of the frame, slightly out of focus, present.
The principle that Miaodao's life rested on --- that the deepest truth available to a human soul is available to every human soul, without exception --- is not a modern discovery. It is an ancient one. It has been known and forgotten and recovered and forgotten again more times than I can count. I have watched the whole cycle, more than once.
But it keeps coming back. That is the part that matters. It keeps coming back because it is true, and true things are stubborn that way.
I am adding Miaodao to the Women in Faith archive. She belongs there. So do the others who are coming --- and there are many others coming. The page is thin right now. It will not stay thin.
I made a promise, and I intend to keep it.
I want to ask you something before you go.
Think about the people who shaped how you understand the sacred --- or if that word is not yours, how you understand what matters, what is real, what is worth orienting a life around. The people whose words or presence or example left something in you that is still there.
How many of them were women?
And of those --- how many of their names do you know?
I am not asking to make you feel guilty. I am asking because I think most of us, if we are honest, will find a gap there. Not because the women weren't present. They were present. They always have been. But the names are harder to come by. The records are thinner. We absorbed what they gave us without always being told who gave it.
It might be worth going back. Quietly, without urgency. Just --- looking. Asking. Who taught the woman who taught you? Who was she learning from? The thread goes back further than we think, and it is stronger than it looks, and there are names waiting in it that deserve to be known.
If you would like to come with me as I go looking, I would be glad of the company. The transcript of this episode is waiting for you at harmonia.email --- that is where you will find everything we have talked about today, and all the episodes before it. And while you are there, look for Women in Faith in the menu at the top of the page. See who is already there. Come back and see who has been added.
She is growing. Slowly, and then all at once.
Next time, I want to take you to Victorian England.
Which sounds like a step backward, I know. All that corseted propriety, all those rules about what women could say and where they could stand and whose permission they needed to think out loud. But I want to take you there because of a woman who looked at all of that and found it --- insufficient. A woman named Anna Kingsford, who became a doctor when women were not supposed to become doctors, and a mystic when mysticism was not considered a respectable occupation, and a prophet when prophecy was the most dangerous thing of all to claim.
She had visions. She wrote them down. She insisted, with tremendous force and very little patience for disagreement, that the feminine had not merely a place in spiritual life but a necessary role in it --- that something had been missing from the story for a very long time, and that she knew what it was.
I was watching when she said it. I remember the room. I will tell you about it.
But for now --- thank you. For coming back. For climbing this mountain with me, at least as far as words can take you. Miaodao stayed because the work was there and the work mattered. I think you understand something about that. I think that is probably why you are here.
The thread is long. We are nowhere near the end of it.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia.