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Topic from the Devadatta chapter of the Lotus Sutra watatsu umi no From the depths soko yori kitsuru of the ocean rising up, hodo mo naku in an instant kono mi nagara ni she attained perfection— mi wo zo kiwamuru her body just as it was. —Fujiwara Michinaga (966–1027), Shinkokinshu\ SKKS 1928.1 An obvious place to begin our search for such factual items bearing on the mind-set of a woman of the military class in the last decades of the thirteenth century would be all kinds of available literature from that time, not necessarily—or even primarily —the official pronouncements of church or state, literarily or historically important , but writings of a more casual nature, whose author had no more ambitious agenda, perhaps, than to tell a good story. The great scriptures, commentaries, and historical records all have their uses, of course, but the popular literature of tales and unpretentious religious tracts may tell us more about the actual workings of a society than its authors could ever have imagined. In 1300 the Rinzai Zen monk Muju\ Ichien (1226–1312) wrote a discourse in vernacular Japanese as a kind of Buddhist handbook, and he called it the Mirror for Women (Tsuma kagami).2 Muju\ was most probably born in the city of Kamakura, received his early training there at Eisai’s Jufukuji,3 traveled and studied extensively, eventually becoming abbot of Cho\boji temple in what is now Nagoya, where he wrote his well-known collection of “tale literature” (setsuwa), the Collection of Sand and Pebbles (Shasekishu\, 1279–1283),4 many of whose anecdotes and comments are based on contemporary events: he makes a special point, in fact, to avoid twice-told tales and to assure us that he either witnessed the incident himself, or heard about it from an impeccable authority. The Mirror is similar in style to Sand and Pebbles in its doctrinal diversity, in the rather terse treatment of the anecdotes which illustrate a moral and, in an occasional flash, even the humor for which Muju\ is noted. 15 Muju\ Ichien’s Mirror for Women (Tsuma kagami, 1300): A Buddhist Vernacular Tract of the Late Kamakura Period 2 Since Kakusan was Muju\’s junior by twenty-six years and he became abbot of the Cho\boji in Nagoya in 1262, when she was only ten, it is quite possible that they never met, although they did share the same Kamakura of samurai principles and religious ferment. They also shared the liberal religious values of Shih-fan’s disciples , Wu-hsüeh (Mugaku) and Enni, as well as Jufukuji’s Eisai; and it is also probable that they had a number of friends, acquaintances, and maybe even enemies, in common. After the death of her husband, Tokimune, Kakusan Shido\ built the To\keiji in 1285, retiring there as its founding abbess. Fifteen years later (1300), Muju\, in his seventy-fifth year, composed the Mirror for Women at his country temple in Nagoya. But the Kamakura of his youth appears quite frequently in his works, and it is difficult to think of any other contemporary writer more likely to have understood Kakusan’s world. However, we have noted over the years that whenever the Mirror is mentioned, the same short paragraph is invariably cited to support an anti-feminist charge against the essay, its author Muju\ Ichien, and the position of Buddhism in general toward women. We would like to set the record straight. If the reader has the time and interest, our first recommendation is not to rely on any second-hand comments , including our own, but to carefully read what Muju\ himself actually says, in this work and others.4 Accordingly, we now offer a complete translation of the Mirror so that it can be judged in its totality, without selective editing. We do not pretend that the Mirror is one of Japan’s great literary monuments—but it can probably tell us more about commonly accepted Kamakura attitudes toward women and Buddhism than any other writing, including the great military epics and celebrated religious tracts. THE MIRROR FOR WOMEN (TSUMA KAGAMI, 1300) Difficult to attain is birth in human form.5 But although we may now have attained it and may have seen with our eyes the impermanence of the cycle of birth and death, we may not feel this in our hearts, and then we are like trees and stones. Difficult to encounter is the Buddha’s teaching. But although we may...

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