Dear old work platform, it's not you. It's us. Actually, it is you. Endless onboarding? Constant IT bottlenecks? We've had enough. We need a platform that just gets us. And to be honest, we've met someone new. They're called monday.com, and it was love at first onboarding. They're beautiful dashboards? They're customizable workflows? That is floating on a digital cloud 9. So no hard feelings, but we're moving on. Monday.com, the first work platform you'll love to use. Hi there, and welcome to the new books and Buddhist Studies channel of the new books network. I'm your host, Scott Mitchell. Today, I'm delighted to talk with Professor Laurie Meeks of the University of Southern California about her new book, Hokagee, and the re-emergence of female elastic orders in pre-modern Japan. This book looks at a period of Japanese history called the kamakura era that lasted from about 1185 to 1333. It's a fascinating period of history for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that this is when a lot of people think that Japanese Buddhism really came into its own, when Japanese Buddhism really became Japanese. Now, that's an assumption that's often overstated, but it is nevertheless true that a lot of really interesting things were happening during this period, and Professor Meeks looks at one interesting story that of a convent called Hokagee. Originally founded in the seventh century, Hokagee declined its significance until it re-emerged in the 13th century as not only a pretty important pilgrimage site, but also the site of a re-established monastic center for women. Buddhism, like a lot of religions, has some pretty androcentric rhetoric. One would be right to say that it's as patriarchal as any other institutional religion, but Professor Meeks's study challenges some of the assumptions and biases of previous scholarship to show how women were able to assert their own autonomy and talk past this rhetoric in some pretty interesting ways. It's a great book. I had a great talk with Professor Meeks, so without further ado, here's the interview. Hello, and welcome to the new books in Buddhist Studies show. Today we're talking with Laurie Meeks of the University of Southern California about her book, Hokagee, and the re-emergence of female monastic orders in pre-modern Japan. It's a great book. It's a really fascinating look at a pretty interesting time in Japanese Buddhist history, and I highly recommend it, and I'm delighted to be talking with the answer today. Thanks so much for joining us, Laurie. How are you? Great, thank you for inviting me to do this interview today. Very grateful for the opportunity. My pleasure. So as we get started, I thought we'd start off by asking just, you know, a little bit about yourself and how you became interested in studying Buddhism in general, but also in this particular topic. Oh, thank you. Well, I first became interested in the study of Buddhism largely through an interest in religious studies, and largely because I was trying to make sense of my own religious upbringing. I grew up in a Southern Baptist family, Southern Baptist community that was pretty conservative, and I think growing up, I was really frustrated by the fact that there were so few female role models in the church. It was made very clear that women weren't allowed to have any leadership roles in the church, even though there were a lot of very talented women in the community who were interested in serving in some kind of public way. And so I think I've had this kind of longstanding interest in the relationship between gender and institutional religions, or institutionalized religions. And in college, I started out pre-med, and I guess like many people started out pre-med and found that I really enjoyed the religious studies classes more than chemistry, and biology, and so on. And so I ended up in all these religious studies classes, and finally I realized that that I thought I could spend my career doing this, reading books about religion and researching religion. And I think Buddhism was attractive to me in the beginning because it was so different from what I had grown up with, and initially it seemed like this tradition that was much more flexible in terms of certain doctrines, not being as rigidly applied in social situations and so on. And of course, a lot of my early idealism about Buddhism kind of faded as I learned more about it. But a lot of that attraction is still there. And I think that it was just very interested in Buddhist philosophy early on. And then my desire to go on and study the relationship between women in particular kind of came out of this larger interest in the relationship between women and religious organizations more broadly, and trying to understand how it was that so many religious institutions had managed to keep women out of leadership positions and so on, and I think I wanted to see what the situation looked like in Buddhist orders. And my interest in Japan sort of came from a different part of my life. I was able to spend a summer in Japan as a not only an exchange in exactly, but on a homestay exchange program for six weeks and just sort of fell in love with it. It was my first time outside of the Midwest really, and became interested in studying Japanese after that. So I started Japanese in college and loved the language classes and then just kind of managed to put that interest together with this interest in religion and women's studies. So do you want me to say a little bit more about the sort of transition into talking about the topic of the book? Sure, yeah, absolutely. This is a book part of your dissertation research. Did I get that from the sleeve somewhere? It was. It was sort of an expansion of the dissertation, but it definitely came out of the same interest in the same initial research. The choice to study this particular period of Japanese Buddhism in many ways reflects larger trends in the field. As I'm sure you're aware, it's a pretty popular area. In Japanese Buddhist studies, the Kamakura period has long been sort of the most popular period to study because there was, for so long, this idea that this was the period when Japanese Buddhism became Japanese and this is a period when Japan sort of contributed something new to Buddhism. And a lot of those ideas have been dispelled by now, but still it's a period that attracts a lot of attention. And I think it was because there was so much writing in English, probably on this period and writing in Japanese on this period that I first became interested in the Kamakura period. But I guess I was interested in studying women's rules in Buddhism and especially in understanding how women interpreted and made sense of doctrines about women, doctrines about gender, doctrines about what women had to do to get into elevation and so on. And I sort of stumbled upon the Hokke-Metsudai-ji Engi, which was one of the texts that I talk about a lot in the book. This was a temple origin narrative. So a narrative that tells about the founding of Hokke-ji, in somewhat mythological terms describing miracles associated with this convent Hokke-ji, describing its revival in the 13th century and celebrating its female founder, Empress Komeo or Queen Consort Komeo. And when I discovered in this Engi, which I found a reference to it in a footnote and it hadn't been this center of any major study in Japanese. People referred to it, but no one sort of took it. This particular text is a main object of study. And in reading through it and sort of spending time studying it, I realized it was a very different and presented a very different view of how women actually made sense of Buddhism and practice Buddhism. This was a text that doesn't talk at all about the obstacles women face on the Buddhist path. It doesn't talk about women in any kind of derogatory way, as many of the doctrinal texts of the period do. But instead it celebrates this founder of Hokke-ji as a kind of divine figure as a model of religious practice for women. And so I guess came up with this idea that through looking at texts like this, I could explore the relationship between Buddhism and women in the Kamakura period from a different angle and I wanted to see where that would take me. If we began to look at text other than the commentaries and a sutra studied by male monks, would we begin to understand this relationship differently? A sort of usual suspects. So on that note, let's sort of take a step back for a second, because I think that some of our listeners, like you were saying in the beginning, we have some ideas about or some beliefs about Buddhism as being different from more conservative kinds of religions, some ideas that you were dispelled in your studies, that I think happens to a lot of us. But to just sort of set the stage here, there are clear differences in how men and women or monks and nuns are supposed to approach Buddhism and different ideas about how women may not be able to attain enlightenment or different ideas about women's bodies. So as some of the background to some of the issues that you're dealing with, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about some of those differences between women and women or how in some of the commentary texts you talk about that monks write, how they problematize women's bodies and whatnot and sort of set that stage for where your book, I think, you know, takes some interesting perspectives. Sure, thank you. Well, I guess there are a couple of different trends that are very in within Buddhist doctrinal texts that are important for understanding how Buddhist doctrine and sort of orthodox Buddhist texts tend to view women. One is the idea that a female birth is a lower birth in the possible types of birth one can achieve. So, of course, we have this idea in Buddhism, in East Asian Buddhism it was usually six realms of rebirth, the human realm being the lower of the three higher realms. And within the human realm, of course, there was this idea that depending upon your karma from past lives, you could either be or you could not either, it's not either or, but you could be born in a wealthy family as a beautiful person, as a man, as someone who would be born into a position that would allow them to become a Buddhist priest, for example, or one could be born in a family of very, very little means of a poor family, one could be born without the sort of luxury of studying Buddhism, one could be born in a female body and so on. So, there are all these different possibilities in a female body was was seen as being a lower birth. And this is something that comes up in a lot of Indian texts, not just in Buddhist texts, but it's it's said again and again in Buddhist texts. It may be clear that a birth as a woman is not an ideal birth being born. I mean, it's great that you're born in the human realm. So it's it could always be worse when female in the hell realms or something like that. But there is this idea that inherently women are of lower birth than men. And so this reflects that they have less karmic merit from their past lives than do men living at the same time. So that idea runs throughout Buddhist texts and is invoked frequently when Buddhist Buddhist monks are talking about women's salvation. And then in another sort of important try and remind in Buddhist discourse is the notion that women are a distraction to male monastic practice. They're in our temptresses. They look beautiful on the outside. They will threaten to take men who are supposed to be celibate as Buddhist practitioners away from the true path that this this beauty will kind of trick them and inherently are if we look deeper, we find that this beauty is in fact fleeting. It's something that women use as a as a trick to pull men off the Buddhist path and so on. So there's also a lot of discourse in that vein talking about women as temptresses. And and usually that discourse was meant for monastic communities. It wasn't a kind of discourse that was meant. I mean, this is something at least I find in a lot of the Japanese texts, we don't see many monks talking to say female lay patrons about this notion that women are temptresses. It's really a discourse that's meant probably for a male monastic audience, but it is there and it does have it's repeated again and again throughout Buddhist doctrinal sources. So those those views very much shaped especially the way that monastic communities view women. And there were specific doctrines that that I talk about in the book that could become very well known in Japanese monastic discourse and among the more elite and educated lay patrons in medieval Japan. And these are doctrines or ideas that come up, especially in places like the Lotus Sutra, they come up in a lot of Mahayana literature. One is the notion that there are five particular ranks in the Buddhist cosmos that a woman can't that can't be achieved in a woman's body. And one of these the fifth is that of a Buddha. So this notion that a woman cannot achieve Buddhahood in a female body is emphasized in this this idea of the five obstacles. And there was another concept known as the three Obediances of the thrice following, which said that women were to follow men throughout their lives. Their fathers when they were young, their husbands when they're middle-aged and their sons when they're older. This idea can actually be traced back to the laws of Manu. A text that becomes important about later known as Hinduism, but it's also picked up or repeated a lot in Confucian texts. And it becomes part of a kind of standard discourse on women in Japanese doctrinal texts by the Heian Period. I'm sorry, go ahead. Oh, I'm sorry. So if those ideas and then what finally I wanted to mention one more, there's this notion that women need to seek rebirth into a male body if they want to attain salvation or attain Buddhahood. And so there were actually some esoteric practices that we can find some mention of in early Japanese, well, maybe hand texts that talk about particular methods women can try to practice in order to attain birth in a male body. And this is something that a number of medieval monks pick up on as well. These teachings on how to achieve birth in a male body. Right. So I got the impression that in your book that you mentioned, it seems like some of these ideas came into Japanese Buddhism after Buddhism was already in Japan. And I remember at one point, you mentioned something about that that almost like women and monks had to be taught that women's place was sort of subordinate or that women's bodies were somehow defiled. So was this is it fair to say that some of these ideas were somewhat late in terms of the history of Buddhism in Japan? I think it's largely a matter of how they were disseminated and when, and to what groups sort of how they spread and what the methods of transmission were. I think that a lot of these ideas would have been known among elite monks, rather early on, say during the Han period, but that they don't really spread outside of monastic communities until a bit later on. And that it's not really until the Kamakura period that we see a lot of monks actively teaching women about these particular doctrines of women's salvation. Then in the Han period, there was this there was a growth in practices connected with esoteric Buddhist centers. A growth in practices meant to keep women out of sacred spaces, like Mount Hea and Mount Koya centers of esoteric Buddhism. So there were certain elite women who knew that the monks at these esoteric centers didn't want women to be in those sacred spaces. But they didn't know a lot about, I don't think they knew a lot about the reasons behind that. And I think it wasn't until the Kamakura period that monks were really actively teaching women why they were defiled or why they needed special help in order to gain salvation and so on. If we look at the Han sources, even those esoteric priests who don't want women to climb the sacred mountains, they're still willing to take on female friends down in the city and to perform special rights for women and so on. And it seems that usually when those monks were interacting with female patrons, they tended to tell those female patrons what the female patrons wanted to hear, to emphasize what they could offer those women, rather than to tell them, "Hey, look, actually, we think you're defiled." And it doesn't seem to be until the Kamakura period that monks are kind of, or maybe even the late Han period that we have people like Honan who are actively telling women, "Look, as a woman, you have special, you have special, soteriological needs, and we can fill them." So I think it's mostly a matter of spread. And in the Han period, there certainly was knowledge of these discourses, but I don't think that that knowledge was as widely disseminated among the population as it becomes in the Kamakura periods and later. Right, right, so your book focuses mostly on this one particular convent called Hokage, that gets sort of re-established in the Kamakura period. But you said that it was a somewhat important center before that, correcting that it had sort of declined in significance, and that's part of the story. And so, can you say a little bit more about what this particular convent was, and when it was established, and how it sort of declined, and the circumstances that led to its re-emergence, which I think is the heart of your book that we're getting to. Sure, absolutely. So Hokage was originally established by a woman known as Queen Consort, Kommio, popularly known as Empress Kommio. She was the consort, and many did a co-ruler of Emperor Shomu, who was an important emperor in the eighth century. And one of the acts of Buddhist patronage that Kommio and Shomu enacted during their reign was to create monastic temple nunnery pairs in each of the provinces of Japan at that time. We don't have evidence that these were actually built in every province, but it does look like they were built in many more provinces than was previously thought. So many of these do appear to have been built. And the idea originally was that these would be places where monks and nuns would say prayers for the protection of the state, basically, the success and protection of the state. And Hokage was the nunnery of the main nunnery monastery pair in the central province in Yamato. And so it was seen as kind of the head of this large network of convents throughout Japan. We don't know a lot about how it functioned in that period when it was first established in the eighth century. But there do appear to have been many nuns who were active there. At that time, nuns were able to gain official ordination through the state. They were regarded as bureaucrats of the state. So they received stipends from the state. And this was a period when nuns seemed to have been held in high regard by the state. That didn't last for too long. We know that the last ordination of nuns took place sometime in the ninth century. And then after that, we have no more records of women receiving official ordination as as full fledged bikuni or bikshuni until Hokage used revived in the 13th century. And at that time, the ordination the methods of ordination have changed to a great extent. And when the nuns are being ordained again in the 13th century, they're being ordained by Ason and his group who are giving bikwini ordinations, but they're not using official certificates from the state. So it does become, it's the revival of this official ordination system, but the authenticity is no longer coming through the state. So it's a very different system in the 13th century. But basically, what we know is that the official ordination of women stops sometime during the 19th of the ninth century that is not revived again until the 13th. And during that period in between, Hokage appears to have gone through sort of waves of neglect and then sort of mini revivals, if you will, there appear to have been women who were kind of taking care of of the temple and its grounds and some of the main images, or of the images that were stored there and so on. But we don't have a lot of detail about what exactly was going on there. It's just mentioned here and there in various records. And I go through a lot of those details. And you mentioned there were like privately, privately confessed nuns is how you describe them, women who would tend sort of self-proclaimed themselves as nuns, but weren't officially recognized, Vanny, either state or Buddhist or Thadoxi for fun. Yeah, there's sort of a mix of levels of the degree to which they were actually recognized. We no longer had, after the ninth century, there are no longer women who are receiving sort of state-authorized bikrini ordinations, whether taking hundreds of precepts. But we do have a lot of women who, in some ways they're called them lay nuns or privately professed nuns, women who usually have taken the Bodhisattva precepts and have changed their dress and outward appearance. So they look like nuns and have devoted themselves to daily Buddhist practice and so on. They live in a place like, at a place like Kolkedji and teach lay pilgrims about the temple or about, you know, general Buddhist concepts and so on. And you know, actually there were a lot of men during this period who became what we might call sort of lay monks. And there's a sort of flying scale of monastic commitment. And during this period, especially during the ham period, especially Ann Kamakura as well, it was very common for people upon their retirement or perhaps after their kids had left home and they were starting to think about preparing, really preparing for death in many ways, that it was very common for people to kind of retire from lay life and take some kind of precepts. And very frequently that didn't mean taking full fledged precepts as a monk or a nun, but something around the level of novice precepts or the Bodhisattva precepts. And they would commit themselves to Buddhist practice but wouldn't have been regarded by the state as official sort of monastic bureaucrats. And so in some ways, what the women who were living at Kolkedji during this intermittent period were doing was not that different from what a lot of men were doing. It's just that they didn't have the option of going further and taking more precepts and men did have that option. But we think that right before Kolkedji was revived in the 13th century, there were a number of women living there who had taken probably the Bodhisattva precepts from monks in the area and were living in Kolkedji, taking care of the main image, which was an image of the 11-faced Kanon. And this was popularly understood as an image that was created in the likeness of Empress Komio. So this image stood both for Kanon and for Komio herself. They took care of this image and would tell pilgrims who would come to Kolkedji on pilgrimage about the miracles associated with Komio and Kanon there. So I think that they were kind of at the heart of this revival when it finally happened in the 13th century. I got the impression that previous scholarship has sort of given a lot of credit to the monk Asan as being the person who really revived the monastic order there at Kolkedji. But it seems like you're suggesting it's a bit more complicated than that. It wasn't all just his doing. And you highlight some other important figures in the story and other ways that the convent became important, like the statue of Kanon. And it became a pilgrimage site. So what were some of the events that were happening here? In addition to Asan, I mean asan is obviously important, so tell us a bit more about him and why his role is important, but also some of the other factors that were going on and the other important people, particularly the women involved. Thank you. Well Asan is a really interesting figure. His main interest was in reviving the Vinnya precepts and he felt that the Japanese Buddhist order was essentially inauthentic. And I think much of what he was critiquing was the Kenmitsu Orthodoxy of the day. So he was critiquing the Xingon establishment and the Tendai establishment, I think. But he was making sort of outright critiques of them, but was talking about how in general Japanese Buddhists didn't follow the Vinnya correctly. And for this reason, the Buddhist order in Japan wasn't all that authentic. And this was actually part of a larger trend that was taking place in Nara, this old capital. And then I talked in the beginning of the book, how by the beginning of the Han period, a lot of the important Buddhist centers had moved to this new capital of Han kill. And Nara in many ways felt kind of left behind. So by the Kamakura period, this is in some ways, even more strongly felt perhaps. But there was this revival in Nara. It was very much centered around Vinnya practice. And I think this idea that what Nara could contribute, the city of Nara and its monastic communities could contribute to Japanese Buddhism, was a revitalization of the monastic law that this was kind of going back to the basics. But at the same time, a lot of the priests active in Azons group were looking towards China and they were trying to evaluate the degree to which Japanese Buddhism had failed to implement a lot of Buddhist practices as they were carried out in China. And so I think there was this kind of comparison that a lot of these priests were trying to make. And they were looking at a lot of of texts that were coming in from China at the time. I think Zen, the import of new texts from the Zen tradition, which were starting to happen around this time, played a large role. And that many of the monks in Azons group were seeing that in the Chinese tradition there was a nuns community and this was something that was missing in Japan. So they talk a lot. Azon talks a lot in his text and I look at his commentaries but also at his autobiography and his collection of sermons or short sort of speeches that he gave on ritual occasions. And he talks a lot about the importance of having a sevenfold Sangha in Japan. And this was an idea that he had picked up from a lot of Chinese texts. And four of the groups in the sevenfold Sangha were actually made up of women. Lay women, novice nuns, postulate nuns. So these are nuns who have gone past the novice stage but are expected to be novices for a bit longer to make sure that they are not pregnant before they're made into bikuni and then fully ordained nuns. So we have these four groups and you only have three groups of monks because of men because they don't have to be screened for pregnancy. So, so Azon realized that in order to fulfill his vision of having a sevenfold Sangha in Japan, a nun's order was necessary and that they needed fully ordained bikuni. Not just women who had taken novice or bodhisattva precepts but full-fledged bikuni. And so I think much of his interest in ordaining nuns came from this notion that Japanese Buddhism wouldn't be authentic if nuns weren't brought in somehow. Whereas the group that was active at Hokagee before Azon became involved in the revival there, I don't think they were as interested in these doctrinal concerns, which is not to say that they weren't interested in doctrine at all. I mean eventually once they do kind of join forces with Azon, they begin studying sutras with him. He lectures on these difficult commentaries at Hokagee and so on. So they do eventually become interested in doctrine but much of what they're doing at Hokagee, especially before Azon gets involved, is centered on these very localized devotional practices and especially devotional practices centered on Empress Komal. And I think that they had created, before Azon got involved at all, they had sort of put Hokagee on the pilgrimage map. So around this time it had become popular among elites living in the capital of Kyoto or Hankyo. It had been popular to go on all kinds of pilgrimages. One of the popular routes was in Nara to go down to the city of the old capital of Nara and to visit some of the old great temples from the Nara period. And Hokagee eventually begins to show up in pilgrimage records that were being passed around hand aristocrats during this time. And aristocrats of the early Kamakura period as well. And so once they get into these, they manage to get into the pilgrimage records or journals that are being passed around. Stories about the miracles associated with Empress Komal and so on begin to inspire more pilgrims to come to Hokagee. And so it seems that there was a group of women there who had managed to figure out how to attract pilgrims to Hokagee. And they had created a certain level of interest among elites in Hokagee. Right, they were already sort of there and doing their thing before Asan came along and revived a more orthodox. Right, what Asan really did was to give these women the opportunity to take ordination or to receive precepts as Bikuni. So it's many of these women had already taken novice precepts or bodhisattva precepts with local priests and they had already studied under local priests and so on. But what Asan was giving them was the opportunity to take a higher level of ordination to become fully ordained nuns. I think that in terms of the women's autonomy at the convent, I don't think that it changed that much after their alliance with Asan. I think that even as they joined his movement, he pretty much let them manage their daily affairs on their own. What he really offered them was the opportunity to take a higher level of precepts to participate in various rituals and sermons, lecturers, et cetera, that he and his monks were posting. And sort of he enabled them to associate themselves with the momentum that his group was creating. I mean, he was from all accounts, a very charismatic religious leader and had created a lot of attention and had managed to create a lot of interest in the vinnia. He spent much of his life really on the road preaching in the countryside and drawing in new followers and so on. And during this time, he was a very well-known religious figure and had quite a bit of visibility. It's just that the Ritsu group did not come to have a major presence in the contemporary period. But I think even by the Tokugawa period, the group is not that well-known. So today, we don't think that this was a very important religious movement because we don't hear that much about it. But at the time, it was, he was one of the major players in the religious world of Kamakura Buddhism. So I think the nuns had a lot to gain by association with them. They knew they would get more pilgrims coming to their monastery. They knew that they would attract more interest if they were affiliated with these, I think. Right. And really, this relationship really speaks to this question of agency and you mentioned the sort of dominant discourse of an androcentric discourse in Japanese Buddhism at the time that I think is present in a lot of of Buddhism in general. But this question of, you mentioned previous scholarship generally tennisists to portray these women as sort of being subjugated by the patriarchal or misogynistic institutions. But you really show that there's many different kinds of agency and how these women were able to sort of run this convent on their own, as you were just saying. And I'm thinking mostly right now about the one scholar you mentioned, Husakawa, who has this argument about robes and the nuns doing monk salondry. And as sort of showing the relationship between them and if you could just talk a bit more about that, because I guess it's a very important point about how these women were able to sort of be functional on their own within this very androcentric kind of situation. Yeah, that's a good point. I think there's a tendency in a lot of, not just in Buddhist studies, but in a lot of religious studies to kind of focus on doctrines and on text when looking at particular issues in a religion. So, and this is an idea that has been thoroughly criticized and in many sub fields is sort of no longer an issue. But I think one thing that's happened in the study, I mean, it still has this kind of lingering presence in the study of women in Buddhism, I think. And this is still in the Japanese case as well. So, I think many scholars who are looking at women in Buddhism in Japan sort of started with the text. Well, what do the Buddhist interests say about women? What do the commentaries of male priests in Japan say about women? We can look at these texts kind of take out any lines that talk about women or gender and from there understand what the relation between women and Buddhism was in this period and so on. And while that that's important and we do learn something from that, we really have to look at what women were doing in particular places, in particular times, to understand this relationship. Because a lot of the nuns at Hopkins, you were not that interested in doctrine. They probably weren't that concerned with what monastic commentary said about the salvation of women or what certain sutras said about the salvation of women. Now that that wasn't important at all, but it wasn't the main focus of their daily practices. So, in the case of Hulk edgy and looking at what the women were doing on an everyday level, what kinds of rituals they were carrying out, how they were interacting with lay people, even how they were interacting with monks, we see that a lot of those doctrines just aren't really a part of the picture. They're not really how women are understanding their relationship to Buddhism or what it means to be Buddhist, what it means to devote oneself to religious practice and so on. So, I think, in looking at a different conversation, right? I mean, as you say at one point, they're sort of talking past some of the discourse. Yeah, so I think, in many ways, the women really are talking past a lot of the discourse about, especially this notion that women have to be reborn as men in order to proceed along the Buddhist path. Not that there are some examples of women talking about that, but they're far and few between and the Hulk edgy materials do not engage that issue. It seems to be that what they're really concerned about is devotional practices to co-mill carrying out rituals for the community right there around Hulk edgy, doing things for Pilgris and so on. And that just isn't the center of their practice. And so, I think a lot of what I try to do in the book is to move away from this idea that women, or anyone necessarily, any lay person, necessarily internalized what the content of Buddhist sutras and commentaries, that if we're too focused on text and if we make the assumption that women internalize the discourses that we find in doctrinal text, then we're missing a lot of what's going on. And it's easy to make a lot of errors if we make that assumption that what religious practices is about internalizing doctrines found in sutras and commentaries, and so on. And I think that many of the monks in the side edgy order, which is the order that the Hulk edgy nuns were involved with, that they were kind of struggling to put these things together. I don't know that they had internalized all these discourses either. I think they had internalized them a lot more than the nuns had. But I think they were still struggling to put together different discourses that they were finding different Buddhist texts. I mean, they were beginning to pay attention to a lot of continental texts that maybe they hadn't studied earlier because these were new texts or texts that were just starting to draw attention and so on. So, one thing I try to talk about in the book is that even the monks don't seem to, in the side edgy order, don't seem to have what a fixed understanding of how to think about gender or how to think about including women in the order. On the one hand, they knew that they needed to include women in the order into the order in order to create the sevenfold Sangha. But on the other hand, they were aware of all this discourse that talks about the dangers of women. So, I think they were too struggling with, well, how do we incorporate women without falling prey to these problems associated with women? How do we now being seduced by them, right? Yes. So, there are some interesting conversations that come up like when Jisan, the first abbess of the revived Hokkeji, invites, she seems to have invited Ason to come to Hokkeji quite often because she probably looked up to him a lot as this very charismatic leader and so on. We don't have a lot of correspondence between them, but there are few letters that have survived. And there's one letter in which Ason is responding to what appears to have been a request from Jisan that he come and visit her at Hokkeji. And he sort of very politely tells her because she's of a higher status socially than he tells her very politely that he's not going to be able to come. And one of the reasons he gives is that it will look bad to people if it seems that we're too close. And it seems to be hinting at this idea that if he's kind of hanging out with the nuns too much, people might get the wrong idea. He shouldn't be spending too much time, especially in private with women and so on. So he's very careful about how much time he spends with women, even though he wants to include them in his order. And so I think for that reason, among several others, he's very happy allowing the nuns at Hokkeji to have the kind of autonomy they had enjoyed before they became involved with him. And they really seem to have been running their affairs on their own on a day-to-day basis. So I don't think that the site IG monks were very concerned about regulating the everyday affairs of women at Hokkeji. That doesn't seem to be one of their major interests. And I think this sort of general trend has been noted by other people studying monastic communities of Buddhist women in other parts of the world, or other parts of Asia, that usually nunneries are very autonomous in terms of their day-to-day affairs. There may be this idea that the nuns are to answer to monks, and of course this rule that nuns are to bow down to monks regardless of their seniority. So even if a nun has been ordained for 30 years, she has to bow down to a monk who was just ordained yesterday. There is this idea. But in terms of day-to-day affairs, the nunneries seem to have been very autonomous in much of the Buddhist world. So despite the patriarchal or endocentric rhetoric or institutions, there still seems to be a place for these communities of women to have a large degree of autonomy and a certain kind of agency that sort of complicates the picture, so to speak. And I think another kind of bias that has emerged in a lot of Japanese scholarship is this notion that only someone who's really desperate would want to become a nun. So only someone who can't manage to get married or who has faced some kind of terrible failure in the real world would want to become a nun. It's like the last question. Yeah, and it's really interesting because people don't talk about monks that way, right? You don't think it would only become a monk if you couldn't find a wife and you were really desperate. And I think that that kind of, I think of course there must have been cases like that, absolutely. But I think it's really arrogant and it reflects a lot of bias, I think, to assume that women who decide to become nuns in pre-modern Japan must have done it because they were, they couldn't find a proper mate or something terrible that happened to them. But I think what we find in the whole Keiji records is that these women talk about nunhood or the opportunity to become a nun as a vocation, as this is a chance to become a professional member of the clergy. This is a chance to study. This is a chance to have some kind of ritual authority and a chance to teach lay people and to interact with pilgrims. It's a chance to pursue some kind of religious devotion and so to dismiss all of those possibilities and simply talk about it as these poor women is really short-sighted, I think. And it's possible that many of the women at Hokkaji did initially enter the convent because of something not very positive it happened in their lives. But at least the way they talk about it, they managed to talk about it in a very positive way. And I think that some of the women probably did choose to become nuns because they were interested in pursuing some kind of educational or academic training. And if you think about the larger landscape of pre-modern Japan, monasteries really were the major educational institutions of the day. So in some ways I like to talk to my students about monasteries in medieval Japan as being kind of colleges. I mean this is your chance to go to college and learn difficult philosophical text and things like that. So I think it's really dismissive to assume from the beginning that the nunneries refer for women who couldn't come up with anything better to do. Some of us from contemporary Japan, from sort of the biases of contemporary Japan, where a lot of the first scholars who had looked at this, who had studied nunneries, were working from this kind of assumption that in modern Japan this kind of vocation would only be attractive to women who couldn't get married. I mean when we started having more women write about Japanese women write about nuns in the pre-modern period, they started coming up with very different interpretations and many were angered by that kind of bias. Right. It's sort of a weird sexism masking as being sympathetic. It's like only women who can't get married want to become nuns, which in and of itself is sort of a strange sort of sexism, while you're trying to make this argument that they're being victimized. Absolutely, absolutely. There was also a kind of Marxist bias too that religions are, I mean a lot of early religious studies scholarship in Japan was coming out of a broader trend or interest in Marxist approaches to history and many scholars writing about religion, say in the 80s and so on did kind of work from this notion that religion fundamentally oppresses people, including women, or especially women perhaps, but I think so that was in there a little bit too, I think. Well, we're coming up toward the end of our time together, so I'm going to ask the traditional final question on our show, which is what is it that you're working on now? What can we expect from you in the future? Well, I'm now working on this spread of a text known as the Blood Bowl Sutra, which I talk about a little bit in the epilogue of the Hokkaiji book. This is a sutra that spread in Japan somewhat late. It didn't enter the discourse until some probably sometime in the 15th century, and it is a very short sutra that says women are destined for a special hell made up of reproductive blood, so menstrual blood and blood shed during child birth and miscarriage and so on. And this cults to this sutra became very popular during the Edo period, and I'm trying to understand how it spread at that sort of what the vehicles for it spread were, why it became managed to become so popular so quickly once it was introduced. It's a kind of discourse that we really don't see in earlier periods in Japanese Buddhism. I mean, there are these androcentric ideas that I talk about in the book, like the five obstacles and the thrice following and so on. But what we find in the Blood Bowl Sutra is much more more derogatory, and this is a much sort of more clearly sexist view of the female body, something that we don't really find in the earlier text. So I'm trying to understand why it was that this took off in the period that it did and why women were concerned about it about this hell. There were many women who participated in cults to the Blood Bowl Hell, in which they would buy talismans to prevent themselves from falling into the Blood Bowl Hell, would carry out particular rights in association with this belief and so on. So that's what I'm looking at now. And these women were from a wider spectrum? I mean, for a society they weren't just nuns, but also laypeople. Yeah, I mean, it's especially popular. It was especially popular among laypeople. But there were many Buddhist sects that really propagated this belief. Sothos and priests would often put copies of the sutra into women's tombs. They would also sell talismans to women and so on. The Jodo Shupris also propagated the belief in many Jodo Shupris to give sermons on the Blood Bowl Hell and so on. So we think most of the sermons were aimed at laypeople. Wow, it's really, it's just fascinating to see the development of these ideas and how they spread throughout the history of Japan. In your book you mentioned, and we were talking just today about how, you know, some of these ideas were not necessarily widely known, and it seems like some of them are spreading and developing over time, and it's just, it's a fascinating look at the history of Japanese Buddhist ideas. Thank you so much for talking with us today. Oh, thank you. I really appreciate it. And I can highly recommend the book, so for all the sermons, please go out and buy it. Okay. Thank you. That was very nice. Great. So thanks so much. Thank you, Scott. You've been listening to an interview with Laurie Meeks, author of Hokagee and the re-emergence of e-mail monastic orders in pre-modern Japan, for the new books in Buddhist studies channel of the new books network. I'm your host, Scott Mitchell. Thanks for listening. [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
Scholars have long been fascinated by the Kamakura era (1185-1333) of Japanese history, a period that saw the emergence of many distinctively Japanese forms of Buddhism. And while a lot of this attention overshadows other equally important periods of Japanese Buddhist history, there is still much to be learned. Take the Buddhist convent known as Hokkeji, located in the old capitol of Nara. Founded in the eighth century, the complex fell into decline and was all but forgotten for centuries before reemerging in the Kamakura period as an important pilgrimage site and as the location of a reestablished monastic order for women.
This is the subject of Lori Meeks’ wonderful new book, Hokkeji and the Reemergence of Female Monastic Orders in Premodern Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2010). Prof. Meeks questions some of the assumptions and biases of previous scholarship on women in Japanese Buddhism and explores the multivalent ways that Buddhist women were able to assert their autonomy and agency in what is presumed to be an androcentric, patriarchal Japanese Buddhist establishment.
Mentioned in the interview (and in the epilogue of her book) is another Buddhist text called the Ketsubonky or the Blood Bowl Sutra. You can learn more about this and Prof. Meeks’ future work on this subject from the Institute of Buddhist Studies podcast.
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