Charting Known Territory: Female Buddhist Priests

Abstract

This article explores issues of temple succession (seshū), soteriology, and priestly identity through the experiences of three Buddhist women to demonstrate that female priests' experience eludes either/or contrasts between submission to male authority or feminist resistance to patriarchy and to argue for an assessment of women priests' agency on its own terms. Two of these women serve as abbots of temples, while one works as a deputy abbot (fuku jūshoku). They represent temple-and non-temple born (zaike), urban and rural temples, and different regions of the country. They have also each taken different paths to their current roles: one through marriage, and the other two through an unexpected death in the family. Relying on the voices of these priests, this article considers ways in which women navigate the basic pathways of priesthood: how they "choose" to be priests, how they are trained, and how they situate themselves in regard to institutional, doctrinal, and societal expectations. As such, this article also engages the ongoing concern of scholars and activists with politicized, normative approaches to agency in gender studies in non-Western contexts. Eschewing an assessment of what each of these priests offers in the way of resistance, this article instead considers how women priests' experiences allow us to redefine contemporary temple Buddhism.keywords: female Buddhist priests-gender-non-eminent monks-discourses of decline-seshū-temple succession-Nichiren-Shinshū-Jōdo-temple Buddhism Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 44/1: 75-101

The Aesthetics and Emotions of Religious Belonging: Examples from the Buddhist World

“…The contributors necessarily rely on their interlocutors' self-descriptions as Buddhists and eschew prescriptive definitions of Buddhism, or religion, based on doctrine or institutional authority. In keeping with recent studies that adopt a similar approach (Lewis 2014;Samuels et al 2016;Rowe 2017;Starling 2019), they stress the importance of practitioners' voices and understandings gleaned from fieldwork, noncanonical documents, and other sources that demonstrate Buddhist community-building in the terms employed by their participants. Perspectives afforded by these sources reveal that aesthetic forms and their attendant sensorial and emotional practices comprise a nexus within which the phenomenon labeled "Buddhism" and affective belonging are coconstituted.…”

Buddhism and Comparative Constitutional Law

“…For discussions of Yasukuni Shrine and post-1947 efforts on the part of the Association of Shinto Shrines to regain state support for it, seeMullins 2021. 13 For discussions of women clergy and their quotidian engagements with local-level parishioners, seeRowe 2017;Starling 2019. For accounts of exorcism in Japanese Buddhism and its renewal in the wake of the March 2011 disasters in northeast Japan, seeTakahashi 2016. …”