Letters of the Nun Eshinni: Images of Pure Land Buddhism in Medieval Japan (review)

Time and again excuses are made for why there is so little scholarship on the Japanese women clerics who influenced the contours of Buddhism as it became deeply rooted in Japanese society. Most prominent among them has been the "absence" defense. In short: "it cannot be helped that women are 'absent' from the historical record. It is because so few documents pertaining to women exist." This mantra is customarily accompanied by the gesticulated mudra, "empty palms, turned up," signifying helplessness. Here before us is an ideal case. Let's take a look at "absence" and the example of the thirteenth-century nun Eshinni.

James Dobbins, preeminent American scholar of medieval Jōdo Shinshū Buddhism, has presented in this new book the first and complete English translation of the nun Eshinni's letters, together with detailed commentary and thoughtful essays that provide an informative and stimulating context in which to contemplate their significance. Eshinni (1182–1268?) was both nun and wife as well as spiritual partner of the priest Shinran (1173–1262). Tortured by precepts demanding celibacy, but more than that, by doubts about his achieving future birth into Amida's paradise, Shinran experiences a revelatory apparition while in seclusion at Rokkakudō Temple in Kyoto whereby he is told that to cohabit with a woman is not a lapse but an inevitability of his karma, and that he should rejoice because the bodhisattva Kannon will become wife to him and lead him unfailingly to the Pure Land. To make a long story short, he subsequently marries Eshinni. In later centuries, despite his claim to have never taken a single disciple, and for whom being leader of a religious institution would have been anathema, Shinran was transformed into the iconic center of one of Japan's largest and most powerful schools of Buddhism, the New Pure Land school, known in modern times as Jōdo Shinshū, or Shin Buddhism.

In some ways this is really two books. Part I is about Eshinni and introduces her letters in full. Part II, "Eshinni's World," gives an overview of religion and life during her century in three chapters: "Pure Land Buddhism and the Medieval Experience"; "Women, Sexuality, and Pure Land Buddhism"; and "The Medieval and the Modern in Shin Buddhism." Articulate and jargon-free, these background chapters provide a smooth entrée to medieval Japanese society and to the religious tensions that activated doctrinal debate within the Pure Land faith. The book is ideal for introductory course work and can be read profitably even by scholars of religion and women's studies outside the Japan field.

Dobbins's basic assumption is "that a disjunction or gap existed between high doctrine and lived religion." He maintains that "current depictions of religion in Eshinni's time are mostly idealized representations based on doctrine rather than accounts of what people actually did" (p. xiv). Chapter five attempts a partial reconstruction of the current scholarly medieval religious worldview by revalidating revelatory dreams, encounters with miraculous beings, and karmically linked relationships.

Dobbins is to be applauded for taking Eshinni's letters as a starting point to suggest new perspectives on medieval Shin Buddhism and for being willing to "consider evidence beyond the domain of doctrine." In sum, his "core assumption" in employing noncanonical sources such as Eshinni's letters is that they will provide an opportunity to examine "how practiced religion diverges in clear-cut ways from the idealized religion articulated in orthodox doctrine" (p. 154). He faults both modern scholars as well as religious believers for attempting to recast Shin Buddhism as a "universal creed . . . consistent with scientific consciousness and shorn of mythic dimensions," and he aims to counter such modern "pasteurization" of premodern religion, and of Shinran and his teachings (p. xv).

One should be reminded that Japanese religious scholarship has suffered historically because practitioner-scholars in Japan are to a large degree...