Ambivalence Regarding Women and Female Gender in Premodern Shin Buddhism

Abstract

Buddhism's historical attitudes towards women and female gender were ambivalent and inconsistent. In Pure Land Buddhism generally, such instability was seemingly marked in the concept of henjō nanshi, the idea that women would be born in the Pure Land as males, but the historical interpretations of this idea were ambiguous. In Japan, women's participation in Buddhism was complex even before the advent of the Kamakura reformers; subsequently Japan's Jōdo Shin-shū tradition retained a similar character. This article focuses on texts and their audience receptions. The original texts of Shinran contained apparent contradictions, especially about henjō nanshi, because of the way their rhetoric was formed creatively out of earlier Buddhist language. However, gender differentiation does not seem to have been a major problematic in Shinrari's essential thought. Furthermore, it appears that in practice women in Shin tradition adopted multiple interpretations (often ones favorable to women) from the very beginning. The initial issues recurred historically and can be traced through the proselytizer Zonkaku, the "middle founder" Rennyo, and Tokugawa-period writings, over a long span of historical evolution in which in the background women's social power in Japan declined. In the historical context it is hard to identify Shin women's subjectivity with clarity.