Hokkeji and the Reemergence of Female Monastic Orders in Premodern Japan

4 Hokkeji's Place in Eison's Vinaya Revival Movement

117 4 Hokkeji’s Place in Eison’s Vinaya Revival Movement The last two chapters examined the historical development of two discrete discourses on nunhood and women’s religiosity. The first, explored in chapter 2, was that adopted by men and women connected to the elite world of the court. Within these circles, women tended to downplay disadvantages ascribed to female practice in doctrinal texts and focused instead on the prestige afforded to powerful female patrons and on alternative methods of salvation, such as rebirth into Maitreya’s Tuṣita realm. Chapter 3 treated issues of women’s religiosity from the other side by looking at the ways in which members of the male monastic order handled issues surrounding the ordination of nuns and female patronage. There is much evidence to suggest priests outside the Tendai establishment had begun to view powerful female patrons with growing resentment by the middle years of the Kamakura period. Priests active in the Zen and Ritsu movements in particular believed that women had to be put in their place, as it were— something achieved, ironically, by granting women greater institutional inclusion through the establishment of nuns’ orders. The present chapter turns to consider how it was that the interests of these two groups—women with court connections on the one hand and revisionist priests on the other—converged in the large-scale restoration of Hokkeji in the mid-thirteenth century. Why did the women who had gathered at Hokkeji, many of whom had spent their young adulthood at court, become interested in Eison’s movement? How did Eison interact with members of the Hokkeji community, and what place—ideological, political, and social—did Hokkeji come to occupy within his vinaya revival movement? Eison, Saidaiji, and the Nara Vinaya Revival Movement It was during the early years of his monastic career that Eison became interested in the restoration of the monastic precepts and joined a vinaya study group at Kōfukuji. Although initially one of the least-known members of this group, it was he who would eventually launch the most visible and successful movement to emerge from the medieval Nara monastic community. Over the course of his long career, Eison greatly expanded the scope of his ministry, which began with a strong focus on doctrinal matters related to the vinaya but eventually came to embrace a wide range of charity and 118 Hokkeji’s Place in Eison’s Vinaya Revival Movement fund-raising work. His disciples built on his work with commoners in the countryside, developing over the course of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries a vast network of Saidaiji-branch temples throughout Japan. Unlike some new movements founded during the Kamakura period, such as the Pure Land, Zen, and Nichiren schools, Eison’s lineage is no longer influential today. But at the height of his career, he was perhaps even more celebrated than any of the founders of the so-called new Buddhist schools of the Kamakura period. He ended his life as a well-loved public figure who had ordained nearly one hundred thousand people and who counted among his devotees the most powerful political figures of the day, including warrior government regents, tennō, and retired sovereigns. And unlike most of the founders of new schools, he was also esteemed by the old-guard monastic communities of Nara and Kyoto. This fact is well illustrated in records claiming that over seven hundred priests from these communities attended his memorial service when he passed away in the year 1290 (Nishiyama 2001, 43). As mentioned in chapter 3, Eison began his monastic career at a young age. After years of apprenticeship under monks at Daigoji, he pursued ordination and initiation as a Shingon priest. By the age of twenty-five, his enlightenment had been confirmed by a Shingon teacher, and at the age of twenty-eight he received the abhiṣeka, or Dharma anointment (KJGSK 1999, 37, 44–45). Eison’s career took a turn during his thirty-forth year, when, as he puts it in his autobiography, his faith faltered and he began to examine the doubts that had taken hold of him. Reflecting on this period, Eison says that he became disillusioned as he watched many members of his lineage fall into Māra’s realm (46–47). These remarks reflect his longstanding critique that the Shingon establishment had fallen into corruption (see Hosokawa 1999b, 50). Eison writes that it was during this period of intense reflection that he came to...