As a Zen practitioner since I was 20 years old, I have always felt a deep connection to my spiritual ancestors every time I sit. Even walking to my cushion, I feel the pull of a thick cord of history that becomes taught when I cross my legs, place my hands, and exhale.
When I asked to receive the precepts in 2019 from Roshi Joan Halifax at Upaya Zen Center, we didn’t know that our Jukai Ceremony would not be in person—the first time in the temple’s history. We sewed our rokusus at first in person, then on Zoom, quietly sitting in our own digital sewing rooms.
As I began to think about the Matriarch’s Lineage that was part of our study, I was inspired by Barbara Cooper‘s circle of women practitioners’ names spreading out in rays from the center like a sun. But somehow I wanted to make these women connected on a bloodline like my male ancestors.
As a graphic designer, I learned the traditional way of working with rapidiograph pens and press type before computers came along. So I sat and drew some ideas. I thought about other circle forms, of how simple and beautiful Japanese crests were. I had lived in Kyoto for a year and went to large kimono sales, stacks of dark brown and black kimonos in piles, room after room, each with a different white crest on the back collars. The symbols on family crests are called kamon and represent natural images: a mountain, a wave, a pine tree.
I finally decided on a design I called “blood-flower” in my mind. It was one continuous red bloodline that connected each ray from the center of the circle. Like the male ancestors’ lineage, where each person is connected by the line from the teacher above, so each female practitioner in our list was connected in the circle like the petals of a flower. Even though, as I understood it, we didn’t have the historical knowledge of the dharma flowing from one female ancestor to the next, in-person, I wanted to give them that. So the bloodline is unbroken in my design. there is no beginning and no end.
To make the design I used Adobe Illustrator to draw the initial 72 lines required and proportionally spaced. Then I cut a circle in half and built the “end pieces” that attached each line to the next, both in the center of the flower and at the outer edge. Like sewing the rakusu, I digitally “hand-stitched” the ends to each line, using the handles of the lines to increase and decrease the curvature on each petal. I found that the design is a little optically tricky, as the insides and outsides of the lines advance or recede, build or diminish, ebb and flow into each other as you work on it.
To me, the blood-flower looks like a chrysanthemum. And I can easily pick out a place or two where the ends of the petals don’t quite line up with the parts of the straight lines, which I think adds to the fact that it has a human touch, a little wabi-sabi.
Here is a template if you would like to use it for your Zen Matriarchs Lineage. Click to download a high-resolution pdf.
We recognize all laywomen who carried the Dharma
And all the Women Honored Ones whose names have been forgotten and left unsaid.