Liberated From the Male Gaze - Nov. 16, 2019 Lecture at the New York Buddhist Church

This is somewhat of a summary of my talk at NYBC. To look at the Jodo Shinshu view of women is for us to see the liberation of all genders from the male gaze.

Starting with the development of the Pure Land tradition in the area which is now Afghanistan and Pakistan, we can see that Jodo Shinshu has its roots early in Buddhist history. In the narrative long held by Western Buddhists in the 20^th century, the Pure Land tradition was seen as an aberrant strain of Buddhism created by superstitious Chinese and Japanese longing for an afterlife paradise. But in research papers presented at the International Association of Shin Buddhist Studies conferences, I’ve learned that archeological evidence show the distinct focus of Pure Land Buddhism developed in the area north and west of India before Buddhism’s establishment in China. The patrons of this tradition were primarily merchants who traded along the Silk Road. What impressed me is that in the art the patrons are shown not as some wealthy man standing off to the side, but as married couples. As back then and today, small businesses are not run solely by the man while his wife is home barefoot in the kitchen, but the spouses work together keeping track of inventory and sales and dealing with customers and suppliers. For these couples, a Buddhism that emphasized the superiority of male monastics wouldn’t do. The Pure Land teachings offered a path to enlightenment that busy businesspeople could follow. The figure of Queen Vaidehi (of the Contemplation Sutra and Nirvana Sutra) doesn’t wait for death to bring her to the Pure Land but through the nembutsu, she is able to channel wisdom and compassion into her everyday actions, such as tending to the painful lesions of the son, Ajatasatru, that had put her in prison after attempting to kill her.

In China, Buddhism in general enjoyed the patronage of Empress Wu Zeitian (624-705) and both nuns and laywomen were respected on a level close to if not equal with men. The Pure Land tradition flourished with genius teachers such as Tanluan (476–542) and Daochou (562–645), and in particular, Shandao (613-681), who saw Queen Vaidehi as a nembutsu follower all people could identify with.

It is only my conjecture, but I wonder if Buddhism would have taken hold in Japan if it didn’t arrive during the reign of Empress Suiko (554-628). She supported her nephew Prince Shotoku (574-622) in his efforts to learn and propagate Buddhism. But would a male emperor allow a teaching about pacifism into the country and challenge his authority?

[Empress Suiko - from Wikipedia]

Prince Shotoku emphasized Buddhism’s teachings of equality and he championed three sutras – Lotus, Vimalakirti and the Lion’s Roar of Queen Srimala – in which gender is not an obstacle to becoming enlightened and a teacher to many. I feel it is Prince Shotoku’s highlighting of these particular sutras that influenced Shinran (1172-1263) to break out of the demeaning view of women he was fed as a monk on Mt. Hiei.

In Shinran’s time, as through most of the history of monastic Buddhism, celibacy is upheld as a requirement for monks with the argument that women’s bodies are defiled and should be avoided as much as possible. It was argued that because of their defiled bodies women have to wait for rebirth as a man to attain enlightenment. Shinran must’ve known from studying the work of Prince Shotoku that this was not the Buddha’s teaching but it took a dream in the Rokkakudo to wake him up to that discrepancy.

The dream where a male Kannon figure says, “I will appear as a woman to become your wife,” led Shinran to Honen (1133-1212) who had long left the Mt. Hiei monastery to share the Pure Land teachings among the city folk. As scholar Wayne Yokoyama has pointed out, Shinran’s transcription of Honen’s Senchaku-shu includes a passage on the equality of women that doesn’t appear in the officially recognized version of Senchaku-shu. To me, it’s Honen’s disciples who deleted the passage to avoid trouble with the government officials who expected all women to be subservient to men.

Shinran who saw himself as hopelessly defiled couldn’t feel any moral superiority to women and the working folks that the aristocrats labeled “evil persons.” In his interpretation of the 35^th vow, Shinran felt all women would be inevitably enlightened even if for now they had supposedly defiled bodies. In what I call the lottery ticket analogy, if you know someone has the winning numbers but hasn’t turned in their ticket yet, are you going to kick them around or try to be their new best friend? For Shinran, women were already lottery winners, that is, he saw them all as future Buddhas, so he might as well show them respect in the present.

If we take a closer look at the 35^th vow from the Larger Sukhavativyuha Sutra, we see that a lot of the misunderstanding is from imprecise English translations. One example is Rita Gross (1943-2015) condemning Pure Land Buddhism as sexist in her book Buddhism After Patriarchy due to the bad translation of the 35^th vow by Diana Y. Paul (late 1950s? - ), a Japanese American who should’ve known better. In the Chinese version of the 35^th vow, we see three different terms are used which the English translations erroneously render as “women.”

In the 35^th vow as in most of the other 48 vows, the character named Dharmakara in Buddha’s story is confronting his own prejudices, the barriers his ego-self had erected between himself and all other beings. When Dharmakara looks at female persons (nyo-nin 女人), he tends to judge them as female bodies (nyo-shin 女身) according to his heterosexual desires. He realizes in order for him to see them as his equals in the Pure Land, he has to get over his own desire to force them into the image (nyo-zo 女像) he wants to see [more about this in my September 2018 post on the movie “Vertigo”]. Dharmakara realizes it is his male gaze that prevents him from seeing other genders as already liberated in the realm of flowing reality.

Who are the women and people of other genders inspired by these egalitarian teachings of Pure Land Buddhism? Due to history’s patriarchal bias, we don’t know their names but those non-males were there from the beginning – following Shakyamuni Buddha and the Chinese Pure Land teachers, following Honen and Shinran. We know about Shinran’s daughter Kakushin-ni (1224-1282) setting up the Honganji temple as a memorial to her father, but we wouldn’t have the teachings surviving centuries in Japan and coming to us in the West if it wasn’t for the multitudes of women and other genders supporting Jodo Shinshu institutions. Unlike a lot of men making sure their names are in the spotlight for posterity, these non-males received the Pure Land teachings and manifested them in their lives without fanfare. In the nembutsu they experienced being valued for who they are as a person, not because of whose daughter, wife or mother they happened to be and they awakened to seeing all beings as worthy just as each one is. Liberated from any male’s gazes, these folks who Shinran respected as inevitably becoming Buddhas are present today all around us and at our temples.