The Princess Nun: Bunchi, Buddhist Reform, and Gender in Early Edo Japan by Gina Cogan (review)

In The Princess Nun, Gina Cogan explores the life of the nun Bunchi (1619–97), the eldest daughter of Emperor Go-Mizunoo (1596–1680), who ended her marriage at the age of twenty-one, took the tonsure, and founded a Rinzai Zen convent known as Enshōji. In 1620 Bunchi’s mother, Oyotsu, had her relationship with Go-Mizunoo suddenly terminated when, under pressure from the shogu-nate, he took Shogun Hidetada’s daughter, Masako (later named Tōfukumon’in), as his consort. From the beginning, Bunchi’s life was fated to encounter rough waters.

Challenging “the dominant ideology that pushed nuns to the margins of institutional practice in the first place” (13), Cogan provides a full narrative of Bunchi’s life, focusing on how she “worked to create and perform her identity as a nun as ascetic, reclusive, and centered in the observance of precepts” (16), noting that she was able to instill into early modern Buddhists, who were steeped in secularism, a spirit of reform. Indeed, Cogan characterizes Bunchi as a Buddhist reformist.

At the same time, Cogan portrays Bunchi as someone who took full advantage of her class and gender “as a means of generating cultural and religious capital” (17) — something that not only helped her establish a new convent and run it independently of the imperial palace, but that also provided her with financial stability. According to Cogan, Bunchi changed not only how courtly Buddhism was practiced but also how Zen was practiced, thus “serv[ing] as a model of a different way of being an imperial nun” (114) in early modern Japan. Bunchi was economically savvy, too. Cogan details how she was able to secure a stable source of income for her Buddhist institution by obtaining a grant for two hundred koku of land from the shogunate (through Tōfukumon’in) in 1667 as well as a bequest of one hundred koku of land from her younger half-sister Myōshōgon’in in 1678. The annual yield of three hundred koku of rice from these lands ensured Enshōji’s financial security.

What did Bunchi do to make Enshōji religiously distinctive? According to Cogan, Bunchi located Enshōji in a quiet area away from Kyoto; ensured that the Enshōji community was ascetic and disciplined; and established a precept platform. Cogan offers an articulate and erudite analysis of Enshōji’s distinctive features, but it should be noted that her discussion suffers, to some extent, from a lack of specific evidence and even from some misunderstanding.

Cogan notes that, as with elite Kyoto Buddhist institutions, Bunchi’s Enshōji was “subject neither to public recognition nor to official regulation by shogunate” (98) because it did not participate in “the parishioner system that made Buddhist monasteries throughout the realm into bureaucratic outposts of the shogunate” (96). Enshōji’s detachment from the parishioner system, Cogan continues, gave Bunchi “the freedom to practice without fear of external constraints but it also limited the audience for her reforms” (98). As far as Cogan is concerned, this is the institutional context that separated Enshōji from most of the Buddhist monasteries in Tokugawa society.

Here we see how Cogan understands Buddhist institutions and the state in early modern Japan. She notes that the shogunal government instituted the parishioner (danka) system along with the temple registration (terauke) system and that, thereby, it “remade Buddhist monasteries into state offices” (17). However, the fact is that the shogunate neither instituted the danka system nor transformed Buddhist institutions into state offices. Furthermore, the danka system had nothing to do with what the terms “parish” or “parishioner” tend to imply. It is true that the shogunate instituted the terauke system, but its operation was not as simple as Cogan indicates.

When it was formed, the danka system was not really a legal “system” or “institution” per se...