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Sex, Politics, and Buddhist Ideology: A Closer Look at Gender Shifts in Early Japanese Buddhism
Organizer and Chair: Lori Meeks, University of Southern California, Japan
Discussant: Janet Goodwin, Independent Scholar (Retired Professor from University of California-Los Angeles)
In ancient Japan, Buddhist nuns could occupy official state posts. By the ninth century, however, nuns were no longer taking full precepts or serving at court, and large-scale nunneries had disappeared. In time, androcentric Buddhist ideology gained wide influence and women, no longer understood as potential religious professionals, came to be viewed as karmically burdened beings whose salvation required male mediation.
How and why did women, once prominent in the Japanese sangha, meet with this fate? Perhaps because this question is such a difficult one, English-language scholarship to date has tended either to ignore it or to answer it in overly simplistic terms.
Our panel seeks to analyze, in a sustained and nuanced way, women’s changing relationships with Buddhist institutions, ideas, and practices in premodern Japan. Each paper explores the social and political factors that informed women’s engagement with Buddhist discourse at a particular historical moment. Arguing against the “shaman” theory, Yoshie recontextualizes the careers of Japan’s first Buddhist nuns. Examining nuns and Buddhist gender theory during the reign of Koken-Shotoku (718-770), Katsuura suggests that this female emperor’s death signals an important shift in relations between women, Buddhism, and the state. Meeks focuses on the ways in which personal interactions between priests and female patrons changed as andocentric ideology intensified in medieval times, and Nomura explores how women’s concerns continued to shape Buddhist art, even after Buddhist androcentrism had become widely accepted. Together we offer several new perspectives on a persistent question in the study of women and Buddhism.
Beyond the “Spiritual” Female: Contextualizing Gender Constructs
Akiko Yoshie, Teikyo University, Japan
When Buddhism was introduced to Japan, the first to renounce the world were not men, but three women who became nuns. In the seventh century, government records listed 569 nuns and 816 monks, numbers that suggest relative balance between the sexes. But in the years that followed, nuns were gradually excluded from the public performance of Buddhist rites. Conventional wisdom holds that the high social position of women in early Buddhism was a product of Japan’s ancient tradition of female shamanism and explains that women’s later drop in status resulted from (1) the establishment of the bureaucratic official system, which excluded women, and (2) the penetration of androcentric Buddhist ideology. In other words, until other imperatives intervened, serving the buddhas was the “natural” domain of women, just as was serving the kami.
However, recent scholarship has called into question the basic premise of this argument: the theory of intrinsic female spirituality. I argue that studies of women’s roles in early Buddhism should instead focus on the following issues: the ways in which the court’s reception of Buddhism privileged that perceived as magical; the value given to the families of continental immigrants, who dominated the intellectual life of the period; the great political roles of women from powerful families; and the fact that women had not been condemned as impure during Buddhism’s early years in Japan. Examining such issues forwards the historical contextualization of nuns in early Japanese history and escapes the ahistorical mystification of the feminine that characterizes “shaman” theories.
Justifying Female Rule: The Nun-Emperor Koken-Shotoku and the Transformation of Henjo nanshi Theory
Noriko Kanda, Tokyo Women’s Christian University, Japan
Because Japan’s eighth-century sangha followed the same organizing principles that governed the state bureaucracy, only elite men were to exercise authority over others. But while monks and nuns were not granted equality in theory, many eighth-century Japanese nuns were, in practice, entrusted with public roles. The first part of my presentation will examine this contradiction.
The existence of several regnant female rulers in seventh and eighth century Japan also calls into question the general principle that women should not exercise public authority. I am particularly interested in the way that the female Emperor Koken-Shotoku (718-770), a great patron of nuns, interpreted Buddhist ideas. Like the Empress Wu of Tang, Koken-Shotoku used the theory of henjo nanshi (transformation into a male body) in ways that bolstered her political power. Wu claimed the right to rule based on the idea that she was a female manifestation of a male bodhisattva. Since Koken-Shotoku understood henjo nanshi as something that happened upon initiation into the Buddhist sangha, her decision to take Buddhist vows before her second reign suggests that she, too, drew upon henjo nanshi to fashion herself as a male leader in a female body.
Finally, I will examine how, in the years following Koken-Shotoku’s death, affirmative readings of henjo nanshi disappeared and the theory came to be used to disparage female bodies. This shift, as well as at the increasingly explicit use of ideology portraying the female body as polluted, provide the historical context for nuns’ rapid exclusion from public roles.
The Japanese Paradigm of Ananda and the Old Woman in Paintings of the Buddha's Nirvana
Ikuyo Nomura, Joshibi High School of Art and Design, Japan
Around the thirteenth century, the standard conventions of Japanese nehanzu, or painted images of the Buddha entering final nirvana, began to exhibit a number of changes. In particular, nehanzu of this period came to include the portrayal of a single old woman touching the Buddha’s feet and crying. Who is this woman, and why was she added to the nehanzu?
The image of the old woman is based in a story from the early Buddhist sutras. According to the story, when Sakyamuni lay dying, Ananda allowed women to be the first to pay their respects. An old woman arrived and threw herself, crying, on the Buddha’s feet. The instant she touched his feet, his golden-hued body lost all color. The disciple Mahakasyapa, who did not get to see the Buddha on his deathbed, berated Ananda for allowing the woman to approach him. The story suggests that women’s bodies were understood as polluting.
This same story appears in the twelfth-century Japanese collection Konjaku monogatari, but here, unlike in the sutras, Ananda silences Mahakasyapa and is praised by the narrator. Understood as the “friend to women” who persuaded the Buddha to allow women into the order, Ananda became an object of worship during the Heian period. He appears in transformed Japanese nehanzu as a plump, handsome man with a fair complexion. Using both literary and visual images of the old woman and Ananda, I will argue that Kamakura-period nehanzu offered women a compelling reinterpretation of a traditional Buddhist narrative.
When Gender, Religion, and Class Collide: Elite Women and Proud Priests in Medieval Japan
Lori Meeks, University of Southern California, Japan
When it came to issues of gender, elite Buddhist priests in medieval Japan found themselves between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, the texts they labored to read and interpret instructed them to avoid women as much as possible and to steer clear of political and other worldly entanglements. On the other hand, Buddhist institutions in Japan had grown up largely dependent on the patronage of courtiers and aristocrats, many of whom were women. So while the Buddhist scriptures warned priests against interaction with worldly men and with all women, most Japanese priests found that they could avoid neither.
When the power of the court began to wane in the medieval period, however, Buddhist institutions grew increasingly independent of court power, both financially and politically. As this shift took place, many Buddhist priests came to criticize the types of patron-priest relationships that had become traditional in Japan and to boldly assert their independence (and even superiority) as members of the sangha.
My paper will consider several vignettes from thirteenth-century literature that capture this shift in patron-priest relations. In particular, I will examine episodes in which powerful female patrons accustomed to employing Buddhist priests at whim are boldly challenged, and sometimes rebuffed, by charismatic priests like Myoe, Dogen, and Eison. Using these narratives as a guide, I will consider the degree to which certain political and economic changes may have enabled medieval Buddhist priests to implement, more thoroughly than their predecessors had, practices based on androcentric doctrines.