Satomi myodos religious biography takes place at
Subject: Satomi, Myodo,, Priests, Zen--Japan--Biography.
Prior to entering religious life Satomi Myodo was..
Journey in Search of the Way
State University of New York Press: Albany, 1993.
212 pp. $14.95 (paper).
To be a Buddhist in the United States can sometimes mean struggling with a sense of cultural inadequacy.
What would it be like to be a Buddhist in a Buddhist world, to have come to Buddhism as a child, surrounded by other practicing Buddhists? Journey in Search of the Way, the autobiography of a Japanese peasant woman named Satomi Myodo, dispels and fuels this feeling in turn.
Satomi-san had the deep courage of the true spiritual seeker, and she grew up in a spiritually lively world, much of it Buddhist in flavor. Her story, written in 1956 when she was a sixty-year-old Zen Buddhist nun, is full of wonders and anguish, wonders that seem almost ordinary in her cultural context, and anguish that is in no way lessened by the multiplicity of spiritual seekers around her.
Satomi-san lived in a particularly turbulent time, from 1896 to
