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C H A P T E R 1 0 Almost Home Sooner or later, however, the nikujiki saitai problem will have to be resolved. Wayûshi, 1901 That the debate over [clerical] marriage has not yet been completely resolved is because the marriage system has not yet been completely put out in the open. Yamauchi Shun’yû, 1957 Those who wish to maintain the ideals of world renunciation and celibacy regard it as a sign of degeneracy that the temple family (jitei) resembles more and more the lay family (katei). The proponents of world-renouncing lifestyle do, of course, have their own quite valid standpoint, particularly within a tradition like Zen, which has its roots in contemplative monasticism. It makes little sense, however, to force this worldview upon the ordinary temple, where clerical marriage has been the norm for several generations now. Attempts to do so simply hinder efforts to come to terms with the reality of life in the vast majority of temples today. Kawahashi Noriko, 1995 It is said that Japanese Buddhism is lay Buddhism, but ultimately do the clergy themselves really think that? They shave their heads or sport short crew cuts and wear Buddhist robes and a surplice. Superficially they look the same as monks from Taiwan or Korea. In fact, when they meet [their foreign counterparts] don’t the Japanese clerics relate with them as if they were equals? Chûgai nippô, 1991 The struggle over nikujiki saitai, which continues to this day, was prolonged and exacerbated by several important trends in the history of modern Japanese religious institutions. As part of the government’s effort A L M O S T H O M E 229 to modernize social life, Meiji officials abolished government enforcement of such status-based legal strictures as the prohibitions against meat eating, marriage, or abandonment of the tonsure by ordained Buddhist clerics. In effect, the end to these restrictions transformed the mandatory patterns of behavior that had signified the assumption of clerical status into voluntary practices that the clergy were free to reject. Although exactly who was to decide the standards of clerical behavior remained ambiguous and the subject of heated discussion, by the middle of the Meiji era it was clear that state penalties for specifically religious infractions had ended. This trend, in which state crimes are distinguished from moral and religious ones, is clearly a by-product of the differentiation of religious and state institutions that is one of the hallmarks of secularization. Simply stated by Casanova, who has done a fine job of distinguishing the controversial and flawed prescriptive elements associated with the term secularization from the core sociological, descriptive sense of the term, “the core and the central thesis of the theory of secularization is the conceptualization of the process of societal modernization as a process of functional differentiation and emancipation of the secular spheres—primarily the state, the economy, and science—from the religious sphere and the concomitant differentiation and specialization of religion within its own newly found religious sphere.”1 In Japan part of the differentiation involved ending state enforcement of the precepts and allowing control of clerical behavior to devolve to the religious sphere, that is, that complicated space in which parishioners, clerics, and denominational organizations interacted. Naturally taking specifically Japanese twists and turns during the course of early modern and modern Japanese history, the decision to end state intervention into what many government leaders considered to be matters of “private morality” was part of the process of differentiation that occurred in a number of modernizing nations. Particularly during the first quarter of the Meiji era, one can detect an effort to define religion—using the neologism shûkyô as the Japanese translation of that term—precisely as an activity that lay outside the bounds of state jurisdiction. Both Meiji officials, who wished to end their involvement in the exceedingly contentious realm of sectarian doctrine, and a wide variety of Buddhists, who wished to free themselves from the control of denominational hierarchs, used the public/private distinction to justify their actions. Officials like Takasaki Goroku described Buddhism as shinjutsu, an inner concern, and therefore something best left to the individual. Similarly, clerics like Ugawa Shôchô viewed the precepts as a matter of inner morality, and some yamabushi argued that they should not be subject to Shingon and Tendai control because Buddhism involved inner concern, not sect law. Additionally, clerics like Tanabe Zenchi attacked mandatory celibacy as an infringe1 Casanova (1994, 19...

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