Organizer: Elizabeth Lillehoj, DePaul University
Chair: Joseph D. Parker, Pitzer Colleg
e Discussant: Miriam Lindsey Levering, University of Tennessee
This panel examines the agency and empowerment of women who chose to become Zen Buddhist nuns in medieval and early modern Japan. We consider the ways that individuals negotiated gender roles for women and men by constructing Buddhist identities, rather than simply addressing misogyny, or women's marginalization and oppression. Despite its frequent abjection of women, Buddhism at times served as an institutional base that provided women with a rhetorical or symbolic vocabulary for establishing their own privilege and authority.
Participants of this panel locate the historically specific contexts for gendered representations of women who took the tonsure, writing against assumptions of universalized women's experience. In constructing an identity for these women, people of the medieval, early modern and modern periods negotiated amongst competing social interests and groups: monasteries and nunneries; aristocratic and warrior households; court salons; informal patronage networks; formal religious lineages; the academy; and the marketplace.
Anne Lazrove examines Shomyaku-an, a chapel built by a 13th-century nun in the context of women's agency, emphasizing the ways in which the tonsure established an authoritative identity for women. Elizabeth Lillehoj discusses the rhetorical dimensions of the art of two 17th-century princess-abbesses situated between competing institutions and conflicted social boundaries. Joseph Parker analyzes artistic images of 13th-century nuns as they participate in the history of representations of Japanese women produced in Japan and the United States.
Mugai Nyodai and Muso Soseki's Revival of Shomyaku-an
Anne Lazrove, Yale University
Wuxue Zuyan (J. Mugaku Sogen, 1226-1286), a Chinese émigré monk of the Kamakura period, bequeathed a portion of his relics (bone and fingernail clippings) to a female dharma heir, the nun Mugai Nyodai (1223-1298), and asked her to build a repository for them, thus ensuring her status as a successor in his dharma lineage. Mugai built a residential chapel for the relics in Kyoto and called it Shmyaku-an, "Hermitage of the True Lineage."
Mugai is a unique figure in the largely patriarchal annals of Rinzai Zen and her memory was venerated to a degree accorded to few other female Zen masters. In 1340, Mus Soseki (1275-1351), one of the most influential personalities in medieval Japanese Buddhism, built a male monastery on the grounds of Shmyaku-an and moved the original hermitage to a corner of the property, a literal marginalization of Mugai's accomplishments. However, although Mus became the founder (kaisan) of the new temple, memorial ceremonies were held annually on the anniversary of Mugai's death and she continued to be revered as benefactor (kaiki).
This paper examines the creation of Shmyaku-an and its subsequent appropriation in the context of the role and agency of women in medieval Japan, emphasizing the ways in which the tonsure was a factor in establishing an authoritative identity for women that was resistant to male-centered social forces. It also situates this in the wider context of the relationship between Buddhist lineages and sociopolitical power.
Princess, Nun, Artist, and Poet: Negotiated Identities of Two Seventeenth-Century
Women
Elizabeth Lillehoj, DePaul University
Bunchi Jo (1619-97) and Shzan Gen'y (1634-1727) were tonsured princesses active in an imperial court beset with strife. The new Tokugawa regime-intent on consolidating power-restricted imperial privileges, ordering nobles to concentrate on court culture. Overtly complying, aristocrats also resisted; although encumbered financially and politically, they achieved authority in religious communities and cultural eminence in artistic salons. I consider Bunchi and Gen'y in this setting, not so much as half-sisters with a shared mission or a discrete role, but as women who occupied many subject positions. Both became Zen abbesses, and for both, religious devotion went hand in hand with the production and sponsorship of art and poetry.
I address issues about the art of Bunchi and Gen'y-portraits and pieces they produced and collected-to reveal its aesthetic and ideological use-value. In its rhetorical dimensions, their art encoded for them an elite social position. I question why they are depicted in portraits in such a "masculine" manner (compared to portraits of other contemporary nuns), although I avoid hypostatizing a concrete "feminine" in artistic representations. These portraits may seem solid and fixed, but as religious symbols they are polysemous and as gendered representations they are disjunctive.
By emphasizing the early modern context of Bunchi and Gen'y, I highlight their presence in an age of conflict between shogunate and court, expansion of urbanization and concomitant secularization and cultural commodification, as well as the emergence of self consciousness and reflexivity in art.
Historicizing Gender Representations: Japanese Zen Nuns of the Thirteenth and
Fourteenth Centuries
Joseph D. Parker, Pitzer College
This paper attempts to re-configure the identity of early Japanese Zen nuns in light of the revisionist pre-modern scholarship that highlights unequal power relations between genders, social classes, ethnic groups and nationalities. Nuns known to 20th-century cultural historians as Mugai Nyodai (1223-98) and Matsushita no Zenni (13th century) are often assumed to have a uniform and consistent identity, which can be described sufficiently in terms of their relations to such monolithic constructions as "woman," "the late Kamakura period," "warrior families," "Zen Buddhism," and even "Japan." Yet, an analysis of the extant artistic portraits of these nuns indicates that any effort to articulate their significance in Japanese culture or in global women's history is contradictory and riven with both privileges and oppressions.
I begin by surveying representations of these women formulated in pre-modern and modern Japan and the United States. I consider the different identities assigned to these women and the ways in which the representations produce for the women social roles entangled in multiple unequal social relations. I then develop my own representations in an attempt to avoid domesticating the pre-modern feminine subjects into established transnational cultural canons and to problematize my own location in the late 20th-century academy.