there's very little biographical material about Master motion. One source is a short entry about her in the book Zen women beyond tea, ladies, Iron Maidens and macho masters. The author Grace Shearson says, although we know nothing of Motion's early life, her life as a woman, or how she came to practice Zen, her status as a teacher is unquestionable. Now, to put this in perspective, there are many male masters that we likewise know very little about, and that's because the historical records are minimal from that time. It was a time in human civilization when the spoken word, not the written word was the primary form of communication. So as a consequence, there was a lot that wasn't preserved, and some that some of the stuff that was preserved may not even be fully accurate. There are some really inspiring stories, though, based on what is known about motion, Shearson says she was tough as nails, a female Zen master who matched the strongest of male masters. And her very name gives us a clue to this. The name motion translates as Summit, summit of the mountain. So she was legendary. She's even mentioned in the transmission of the lamp, which is a large, multi volume text that recorded the dialogs of the early masters. And it's a text that dates back to the Song Dynasty, but I'm going to use instead Andy Ferguson's translation of his from his widely respected book, Zen Chinese heritage, and that includes some snippets about motion in it, the most famous story about her involves a monk named Guan chi Xian. Who first studied with the founder of the Rinzai school, Master Lin chi. Ferguson says that after training with Master Lin chi, Guan chi went off traveling on pilgrimage, which was a common practice at the time, visiting various teachers and temples, and eventually he came upon motions monastery where she was the abbess. So she taught both women and men at her monastery, typically in ninth century China, as I mentioned earlier, monks would have lived and practiced separately from the nuns in separate area areas of the monastery complex. And on top of that, there was a distinct hierarchy. The monks were ranked higher than the nuns, while the nuns were ranked higher than lay men and lay women, so all lay practitioners, and then traditionally, because the monks had a higher status, it was not appropriate for them to bow to a nun. On the other hand, a nun was expected to bow to a monk to show their respect, and the nuns were also not allowed to correct or critique monks for their behavior, but monks could do so for nuns. But here we have mother motion, a woman, serving as the head of the monastery. The installed abbess, and you can't help but to wonder if the social dynamics at her monastery were any different. For example, did the nuns have more privilege or higher status there than typical, and you could also see the predicament for a monk serving as a student or a disciple of an abbess at that time that would require some real letting go of gender norms.