Beyond the Confines of Duality: Insights from the Spiritual Quest of a Tendai Buddhist Woman Priest

Mary Engel has presented us with a challenge regarding mysticism, and I would like to approach it as a feminist scholar of religion who has studied at an American seminary and now teaches sociology of gender at a Japanese university. The reason I am taking part in this roundtable is that my research interests include the spiritual quest of a woman priest of the Tendai School, which is one of the schools of traditional Japanese Buddhism.¹ Women today who engage in spiritual quests do not all do so for the same reasons or by the same methods. What they do have in common, however, is the element of women's struggle in search of wholeness through integration of the dualisms of spirit and body, rational and irrational, spiritual and social, and so on. In many cases, married women's quests are understood to require an either/or choice between family and religion. One female Tendai priest rejected this either/or choice, however, and instead found her "station-in-life" in Buddhism. I take her spiritual quest as the basis of my response to Engel's challenge regarding dualistic, divisive constructions of selfhood, calling, and mysticism, as well as my response to Engel's quest for wholeness.

Just as a definition of mysticism is difficult to reach, spirituality also has multiple meanings and is difficult to define. Ursula King writes, "From a historical, anthropological, and comparative point of view, spirituality always exists in the plural, as spiritualities." She finds that "these different spiritualities can be seen as different cultural forms."² Here, I understand spirituality to be a connectedness with something greater than oneself. That greater something may for one person be a deity, while for another, it may be Buddha, nature, or truth. Although people seek it through their respective methods, spirituality provides these seekers with a foundation for existence that transcends the framework of an organized religion (tradition), and provides meaning and orientation for living their lives. The spiritual quest of female Tendai priest Yokoyama Hōyū was also a path she took to discover her "connectedness with something greater." By this process Yokoyama found her "station-in-life," which for her constituted truth.

Unlike Engel, Yokoyama did not deny any of her three identities as wife, mother, and Japanese language teacher, although she did experience conflict between them as she pushed onward along the path to wholeness through rigorous spiritual discipline. As this indicates, Yokoyama Hōyū possessed a number of different identities. She was a wife who married in her twenties, and the mother of two children. She has also been a Japanese language teacher at the local YWCA for more than twenty-five years. As a wife, mother, and Japanese language teacher, she says, "There was something within me that could not be satisfied with just that, and that never let me stop seeking" from very early in her life.³ She was seeking the nature of truth, and where she must go to find it. Ever since her childhood, she had been wondering why people were not equal, and thinking vaguely about why people exist. Apparently, her questioning did not cease even when she became an adult, married, and gave birth to her children.

Yokoyama was always seeking, and her spiritual quest began in her mid-twenties when she encountered the Bible. She then drifted from religion to religion until she reached her turning point, which was her encounter with the Tendai practice of mountain circumambulation (kaihō-gyō ). At that point, she said, she had no knowledge of Buddhism, but she happened upon a newspaper travel section with an invitation to a one-day mountain circumambulation practice. Yokoyama decided to participate because, she said, she had previously seen newspaper articles about an ajari who accomplished the thousand-day mountain circumambulation practice.⁴ When she read those articles, tears welled from her eyes and would not stop. Obviously, she had come upon something that had deep significance for her.

Yokoyama therefore took part in the one-day mountain circumambulation. With...