The focus of this week’s readings was on Buddhist world orders, and in particular the way in which the religion – and its followers – oriented themselves within the world. In particular, I wanted to understand how Buddhism was deployed in support of the Japanese state. At a first glance, it seems like such a move is impossible. Buddhism is an other-wordly religion which argues that ‘attachment’ to the material world brings about suffering.1 Nevertheless, Buddhism was used to legitimate Japanese power, the tension between this/other-worldly resolved. In order to understand how this was done, I took a look at several ways in which ‘Buddhism’, as an idea, was reinterpreted and imagined by the state. One such way was through gender. The extract below, from the journal Chūō Bukkyō (1934), demonstrates how Buddhism was reimagined in gendered ways, and how this helped resolved the this/other-worldly tension described.
Through a karmic connection Japan received a daughter from another home as its wife. With a sincere heart this wife worked hard to take care of our home, having children and then grandchildren. Our home, not her original home, has been foremost in her mind. Indeed, from early on, more than a daughter from another home, she has been our wife and mother. (( Ōta Kakumin, ‘Zokuhi zokkai’ in Chūō Bukkyō 18:3 (1934), p. 194 in Christoper Ives (tr.), ‘The Mobilization of Doctrine: Buddhist Contributions to Imperial Ideology in Japan’ in Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, Vol. 26, No. 1/2 (Spring 1999), p. 86 ))
This extract encodes Buddhism with the female gender (‘wife’, ‘home’, ‘children’) contra the Japanese state, which is coded male. This has two effects. Firstly, the term ‘wife’ is used to build a sense of unity between the Emperor’s law and Buddha’s law (王法佛法一如).2 ‘Marriage’ conveys the notion that the Japanese state is in line with the Heavenly Way (天道), and that there is a lot of doctrinal overlap between Buddhism and the state. The emperor, for example, plays the role of the buddha, looking out for his subjects-as-children with the compassionate heart (心). In turn, this gives the state spiritual-legitimacy, with the added bonus of elevating the emperor to an ethereal, buddha-like status.
Secondly, this gendering also imparts feminine stereotypes onto Buddhism, and presents us with an image of the religion as passive and – crucially – subjugated to men.3 This limits Buddhism’s influence within society by channelling its doctrine into areas that are ‘acceptable’ for its ‘gender’, so to speak. Any priests that choose to rebel against the state, therefore, are seen as stepping beyond the boundaries of their ‘gendered’ role. Thus, in siphoning Buddhism’s influence into specific areas, gender imposes boundaries onto the religion so as to limit its power. Buddhists are now no longer unconfined by space and time, like clouds.4 Gender confines Buddhism – and Buddhists – to specific realms that are appropriate and least disruptive to the state.
- Rupert Gethin, The Foundations of Buddhism (1998), pp. 70, 73 [↩]
- Christopher Ives, ‘The Mobilization of Doctrine: Buddhist Contributions to Imperial Ideology in Japan’ in Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, Vol. 26, No. 1/2 (Spring 1999), p. 85 [↩]
- See He-Yin Zhen, ‘On the Revenge of Women: Part 1: Instruments of Men’s Rule Over Women’ (1907) in Lydia He Liu, Rebecca Karl, Dorothy Ko (eds.), The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory (2013) [↩]
- Hwansoo Kim, ‘The Adventures of a Japanese Monk in Colonial Korea: Sōma Shōei’s Zen training with Korean masters’ in E. Anderson (ed.), Belief and Practice in Imperial Japan and Colonial Korea (2017), p. 63 [↩]