Hokkeji and the Reemergence of Female Monastic Orders in Premodern Japan

3 Envisioning Nuns: Views from the Male Monastic Order

91 3 Envisioning Nuns Views from the Male Monastic Order In our country [Japan], there are women who, as daughters of emperors or of great ministers, are basically equal in rank to queen-consorts. Some have received titles as retired sovereigns (in) [making them nyoin]. Some have shaved their heads [become nuns], and some have not. Nevertheless , when priests appearing to be biku [properly ordained monks] who desire fame and love fortune hasten to the gates of nobles, they do not fail to prostrate themselves entirely at the feet of these women. It is even worse than the relationship between a master and his or her attendant. It goes without saying that there are many who pass the years having become the menservants of these women. Oh, isn’t it a pity—having been born in this small and peripheral country, they do not know that this is a corrupt practice, and one that even now does not exist in India or China, but only in our country. We must lament this. —Dōgen, Shōbōgenzō The most powerful position in the Buddhist world that women of the Heian and early Kamakura periods could hope to attain was that of a great lay patron. As demonstrated in the last chapter, nyoin, as political players whose wealth and influence rivaled that of tennō and retired sovereigns, came to play significant roles in the Buddhist world from the late Heian period forward. But their model of female religiosity—that of the patron who conveys her faith through political and financial support—came under scrutiny during Kamakura period. This chapter examines the question of women’s religiosity from the other side, that of the male monastic order. How did priests occupying positions of power within major monastic institutions envision women’s roles in the Buddhist community? In his Shōbōgenzō (Treasury of the eye of the true Dharma), Dōgen critiques the model of female religiosity described in the last chapter, namely, that of the great patron. In the passage above, taken from the “Getting the Marrow by Doing Obeisance” (Raihai tokuzui) chapter, Dōgen speaks 92 Envisioning Nuns: Views from the Male Monastic Order against the obsequiousness of Buddhist priests who serve nyoin (36a4–15).1 At the heart of his tirade is concern about the authenticity of Japanese Buddhism . That many Japanese priests are ignorant of true Buddhism, Dōgen writes, is evident from the fact that they are overzealous in their service of high-ranking female patrons, a situation that “true” followers of the Buddha should recognize as humiliating. The passage further reveals two anxieties also found in contemporaneous monastic texts: concerns about the propriety of close relationships between the sangha and rulers of state and uncertainties regarding the authenticity of Japanese nuns. This first anxiety became noticeable in Japanese monastic literature during the Kamakura period. The idea that monks should steer clear of worldliness was hardly new: the issue is raised both in the Lotus Sutra, translated into Chinese in the early years of the fifth century, and in the Brahma Net Sutra (Fanwang jing), an apocryphal sutra composed in China, where it had gained wide circulation by the late fifth century. In the Lotus, the Buddha declares in the fourteenth chapter, “The bodhisattva-mahāsattva does not approach with familiarity kings or princes of realms, nor ministers or senior officials” (trans. Hurvitz 1976, 208; T. no. 262, 37a22). Closely related to the question of whether those on the bodhisattva path should associate with the politically powerful was the question of whether Buddhist priests should bow down to princes and kings when asked to do so. In China, this question had given rise to fierce debates that began in the early years of the fifth century and remained heated through the middle years of the Tang dynasty. The authors of the Brahma Net Sutra take an unambiguous stand on the matter, declaring in the fortieth of the text’s forty-eight minor bodhisattva precepts that those who enter the Buddhist order should bow down neither to royalty nor to their own parents (1008c5).2 During the Nara and Heian periods, this issue attracted little attention in Japan, where the state had long established itself as the most powerful patron of Buddhism. The state and sangha were so intertwined in Japan that by the mid-Heian period, male relatives of royal and aristocratic families had come to dominate the ranks of the monastic elite (Okano K. 1998, 80...