Pervasiveness of Patriarchy – Sutra Study Class Session 15

 At the June 20 session we looked at the 23^rd to 35^th vows and Akegarasu’s “Cross Section of Love” (Shout of Buddha, pp. 149-157).  I mainly wanted to discuss the 35^th vow but most of what we covered is what I wrote in my blog (https://windycityjodoshinshu.blogspot.com/2018/09/vertigo-and-thirty-fifth-vow.html) and the “Women in Buddhism” series (used to be on the West Covina temple’s website but it was picked up by other websites). The main takeaway is that all the translations of the 35^th vow by ignoring the nuances of the three separate terms (female-person, female-body and female-image) are perpetuating the incorrect notion that only males qualify for enlightenment in the Pure Land.

 

The Akegarasu piece was very problematic for me and others in the study group. No matter how wise a Dharma teacher is in many ways, they are not exempt from our pointing out their prejudices and shortcomings. When I first read the piece as a young (late-20s) single person, the idealism Akegarasu expressed sounded attractive to me, but now as an old married person, his descriptions of relationships are discomforting. I can see Joan Sweany, as a single woman finding agreement with the piece as I did when younger, but I wonder how Rev. Gyoko Saito could relate to it because of how I’ve gotten to know him and his wife Toshiko over the years. Maybe he was still thinking of his first love, the woman he fell in love with when he first joined Akegarasu’s group – her parents objected to his wanting to marry her and she left the group.

 

What Akegarasu describes in that piece is why in Buddhism “love” has the negative connotation of “possessiveness.” I know women can get just as obsessed over a man as a man can feel about a woman, but usually women don’t have the means to turn their obsession into possession (unless she’s the Kathy Bates character breaking James Caan’s ankles in the movie “Misery”). Even in the piece when Akegarasu imagines a man’s life being completely “killed” by the woman’s overwhelming power, to me it’s just a twisted expression of how the man controls the woman by putting her in the role of his dominatrix.

[Poster from Communist Student Union of Germany]

For Akegarasu in his time and place, the pervasiveness of patriarchy was deeply embedded in the culture and despite his knowing the Buddhist teaching of respecting the independence of each being, he may have treated some women in his life more like possessions, receptacles of his urges, rather than as fellow Dharma seekers. At least that’s what I heard one minister in Japan criticize Akegarasu for – stringing along his mistress (during his second marriage) who first came to him to hear the Dharma.

 

There are other pieces in Shout of Buddha where Akegarasu demonstrates respect towards his women followers and I believe his assistants such as Toa Nomoto had boundaries that they didn’t allow him to violate. But no matter who the teacher is, we should recognize that any human will exploit another as an object if society lets them get away with it.