Nuns, court ladies, and female bodhisattvas: The women of Japan's medieval Ritsu-school nuns' revival movement

Thirteenth century Japan witnessed the revival of formal nuns' ordination and the revitalization of Buddhist monastic institutions for women. This dissertation clarifies and analyzes the roles of women—as patrons, religious leaders, ritual performers, writers, and symbols of divinity and motherhood—in the revival of Hokkeji and other nunneries affiliated with the Ritsu school. The thesis begins with an examination of the history of nuns and nunneries in early premodern Japan and suggests that Heian period women redefined what it meant to be a “nun” following the ninth century exclusion of women from state-recognized precepts platforms. It then traces the links between late Beian aristocratic nuns and the early leaders of the Hokkeji movement. Next, it describes the rapid growth of Hokkeji during the mid-to-late thirteenth century and recontextualizes Hokkeji's relationship with the temple Saidaiji, calling into question the notion that Hokkeji nuns were dependent upon the Saidaiji priest Eison and his disciples.;The thesis then considers Hokkeji's connections to the women-centered court culture of Imperial Ladies (nyōin) and their ladies-in-waiting (nyōbō). Exploring the network of readers and writers who romanticized the nunnery as a repository for the literary and cultural salons that flourished in the late Heian period, it suggests that Hokkeji's first leaders envisioned the revival of Hokkeji and other nunneries largely as a means of protecting a vanishing women's court culture. Finally, the thesis shifts to literary analysis, contrasting Saidaiji representations of women and women's salvation with those that emerge in the writings of Ritsu nuns. It argues that Ritsu nuns, in producing understandings of their institutions and of their roles as Buddhists, utilized interpretative structures that significantly diverged from those of Saidaiji priests. While Ritsu priests portrayed the female body as karmically burdened, the nuns fashioned deities out of empresses from Japan's past. This study of Hokkeji and its affiliate nunneries offers a powerful example of the degree to which competing discursive frameworks allowed women to interpret the roles of nuns and the salvation of women in ways that effectively “talked past” the androcentric teachings propagated in doctrinal texts.