I am humbled and honoured by the invitation to offer the opening keynote address to such an important and luminous gathering of women!
Twenty minutes is a very short time in which to address the obvious fact and impact of the silencing and marginalizing of women in the Buddhist tradition for the last several thousand years — and its studied indifference towards the venerable enlightened women who actually managed, against the odds, to break past such formidable barriers to practice, teach and inspire others.
It is of course impossible to reconcile this act of deep injury to the lives of hundreds of generations of women, with the actual core insights of the Buddhist path itself – which is waking up into direct awareness of the undivided and indivisible nature of mind and reality. This we find to be the very source of the natural flow of un-self-conscious compassion that cannot help but respond to the cries of the world!