Tracing the Itinerant Path: Jishū Nuns of Medieval Japan by Caitilin J. Griffiths (review)

One of the facts of life is the small size of the research communities in and out of Japan dedicated to the Jishū (時宗, Time Sect) and the concomitant, comparatively small size of the output of research, especially in Western languages. The Jishū had almost been forgotten in scholarship by the 1970s; its first Japanese scholars came from drama (Kanai Kiyomitsu) and the Jōdo sect (Ōhashi Shunnō), and their influence still casts a long shadow. In the West, the work of scholars, apparently all Anglophone, is represented in dissertations available online and in journal articles and book chapters. Their research has included studies of Ippen Chishin (1239–89) and popular religion, the sociohistorical development of the Jishū, the relations of the second patriarch with warrior patrons, and the relationship between the harem of the Tokugawa shoguns and the divorce temple and convent Mantokuji. Now, however, there are not enough active scholars to put together a conference panel: James Foard has retired; Sybil Thornton has retired; Todd Brown has left academe; Diana Wright has died. The publication of Caitilin Griffiths’s revision of her dissertation is the first good news we have had in a long time: it is the first monograph focusing on the Ippen school of Pure Land Buddhism published in English since 1999 and only the third ever.

Griffiths’s purpose in writing this book is to recover the history of women in Japanese popular religious movements in order to counter the dominant paradigm of Buddhism and its focus on monasticism, founders, rituals, doctrines, and texts, which tends to represent Buddhism as an almost exclusively male domain. Her topic is very narrow: the role of female jishū (時衆, practitioners of chanting the Name of Amida Buddha) during the fourteenth century. Over an introduction and four chapters, Griffiths takes the reader through the nenbutsu (invocation of Amida’s name) and hijiri (Buddhist practitioners outside the temples) movements that were the precursors to the Jishū, the gendering of space in Jishū temples, women’s roles in the multiple practice halls (dōjō) in Kyoto, and the changes in the order’s attitude through the Tokugawa period (1603–1867) and after. Although most of her sources come from those held by the Jishū, she makes clear that not all jishū were Jishū or their precursors in the Yugyō school, the main group claiming Ippen as founder and continuing his itinerant and mendicant mission of distributing amulets imprinted with the invocation of Amida’s name. Indeed, not all jishū were of the Ippen school, itinerant, male, or celibate.

Griffiths draws direct parallels between the general fluidity of society in the fourteenth century, jishū groups in general, and the activities of women in those groups: the chaos caused by the civil war between the Northern and Southern Courts (Nanbokuchō, 1336–92); the expansion of travel and pilgrimage; the developing use of coins and other, private business transactions; and the development of markets in the provinces. Many mendicant-itinerant groups took to the road to preach the invocation of Amida’s name in the many places large numbers of people were to be found: temples, shrines, markets, and army camps. Since women were found in these places as merchants, pilgrims, temple fundraisers, and entertainers, their participation in itinerant jishū groups was no anomaly. That is, the appearance and activities of female jishū lie at the intersection of several social developments: economic, religious, and even medical.

Women were part and parcel of the Ippen-school jishū from the time of Ippen himself. Letters from the heads of the main line of the Ippen school and other documents (death registers, illustrated scrolls, temple architecture) make clear that women lived and practiced together with men and even had specific positions in the organization of the itinerant missions. It is also clear that the documentation provides evidence of early and continuing concerns with socializing jishū to the discipline of accepting the head of...