Tracing the Itinerant Path: Jishū Nuns of Medieval Japan by Caitilin J. Griffiths (review)

Caitilin Griffiths’s study of jishū 時衆 nuns (groups that gathered provisionally for nembutsu chanting six times in a twenty-four-hour period) adds a critical new perspective to our understanding of women’s religious lives in medieval Japan. Her careful research offers compelling evidence that jishū gave women opportunities to work and travel as religious professionals and even to teach and lead mixed-gender nembutsu groups. Although previous works documented the participation of women in other religious orders, such as Ritsu 律宗 (Vinaya) and Zen 禪, Griffiths’s work on jishū draws our attention to a broader demographic of religious women in medieval Japan. Moreover, her study adds to our understanding of nuns’ activities during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a historical period that has not attracted much study in English-language works on women in Japanese religions.

Before delving into the specifics of Griffiths’s research on jishū nuns, it is necessary to say a few words about another important topic of this book: namely, the classification of jishū. According to Griffiths, English-language works have largely misrepresented the history of jishū groups, primarily because scholars have accepted as fact the Yugyō 遊行 school’s version of history. To put it simply, sectarian Yugyō-school historiography identifies jishū with the Ji Sect (Jishū 時宗), which regards Ippen Chishin 一遍智真 (1239–1289) as its founder. Although Ippen was certainly one of the most prominent leaders of a jishū order, his lineage, which became the Yugyō school, did not come to be known as the Ji Sect until the seventeenth century. During his lifetime, Ippen was only one of many jishū leaders; many other jishū lineages also established dojos throughout the Japanese archipelago.

The ubiquity of medieval jishū has important implications in Griffiths’s study. She notes that jishū had a “dynamic and fluid” meaning during the medieval period: “some jishū were members of the Yugyō school, whereas others were only loosely affiliated with a religious school” (p. 3). Many women became members of jishū during the fourteenth century, and as such, they were able to travel widely while gaining ritual and religious knowledge and interacting with fellow practitioners and laypeople, including both men and women. The vocational religious roles offered by jishū, Griffiths argues, “remained just outside the formal structures of Buddhist institutions” (p. 13) and as a result may have been akin to those of hijiri 聖 (holy men) and miko 巫女 (spirit mediums). In chapter 5, Griffiths relates fascinating narratives in which a Yugyō nun experiences spirit possession and delivers messages from a deceased male practitioner.

The book is especially exciting insofar as it further substantiates the somewhat tentative claims about women’s religious authority made in earlier scholarship. In my own work on the nuns of Hokkeji 法華寺, for example, I argue that Hokkeji donors do not appear to have regarded rituals performed by Hokkeji nuns as less effective than those performed by male priests.¹ In her study of jishū nuns, Griffiths also finds that even elite patrons regularly requested rituals from jishū nuns. Even more noteworthy are the several cases she finds in which jishū nuns were granted authority over mixed-gender communities. These examples demand close study, especially since we know of so few historical cases from Japan in which women assumed institutional leadership of mixed-gender religious communities.

But we cannot read such cases as evidence that jishū orders were free of patriarchy. Indeed, Griffiths notes that, even during the height of women’s leadership in the fourteenth-century Yugyō school, male jishū leaders engaged in the common androcentric rhetoric that women were especially evil and were burdened by the karma of past sins (pp. 20–21). As itinerant jishū groups began to settle into stationary lives, building dojos in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, jishū leaders deliberately included women—designing spaces meant to house mixed-gender communities.

Overall, Griffiths’s work suggests that jishū groups gave...