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Status of Women in Pure Land Buddhism Before and Now:

Repudiation of Traditional Doctrines by Hōnen and Shinran

The religious status of women in Pure Land Buddhism has long been a topic of

discussion. Scriptures related to Pure Land Buddhism rarely expound teachings on how women

attain salvation; most spend all the time outlining and explaining how men can get rid of earthly

sadness, depression, and sufferings, and be born in the Pure Land through certain practices. Even

if some do mention woman salvation, their expositions always disappoint women. Mahayana

traditions in India, for instance, revealed that it is possible for women to reach the Pure Land

only after they became men in their next lives. In addition, there are 250 rules for a monk,

compared to 348 for a nun in India (Atone 3). All in all, “the religious path it [Pure Land

Buddhism] laid out was certain to make women feel inferior and to impose requirements on them

that it did not on men” (Dobbins 93). Like all religions, Pure Land Buddhism has a history of

discriminating against women. The way Pure Land sutras were interpreted, however, changed

over time. For example, Hōnen Shōnin (1133 – 1212) has “rectified its persistent misogyny”

(Machida 11). As a Buddhist monk credited with the establishment of Jōdo Buddhism as an

independent sect in Japan, Hōnen propounded that males and females deserve the same chance

of entering the Pure Land and attaining salvation. Shinran Shōnin (1173 – 1262), a pupil of

Hōnen, further enhanced and glorified his master’s thoughts. After the period of Shinran, Jōdo

Buddhism was divided into two branches, Jōdo-shū and Jōdo Shinshū (also known as Shin

Buddhism). The two branches, claimed to be founded by Hōnen and Shinran respectively, hold

similar if not identical stances towards sex – women deserve the same potential as men do to be

reborn in the Pure Land. This paper aims at understanding the philosophies of Hōnen and

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Shinran on woman salvation, which respectively formed the fundamentals of the two Pure Land

Buddhist sects which later became the two largest religious branches in Japan till now.

Ancient Pure Land Buddhist traditions suggested that women were barred from making

spiritual progress. Sakyamuni, even after his approval of the pleas of Mahāpajāpatī, who was his

aunt and step-mother, for the mendicancy and ordination of women, urged that owing to the

acceptance of women into the religion, the Buddhist teachings would enter a period of decline.

With that said, he diluted the influence women posed to the Buddhist community with his eight

special rules by which only nuns but not priests had to abide. In his work, Letters of the Nun

Eshinni: Images of Pure Land Buddhism in Medieval Japan, Dr. Dobbins considers Sakyamuni’s

resolution of treating nuns in a stricter manner than priests a significant evidence that revealed

women’ unsuitability of religious life (94). Women were always excluded from Pure Land

Buddhism; and the situation did not change after the establishment of the Buddhist order of nuns.

In Japanese Buddhism, the narrative between Sakyamuni and Mahāpajāpatī was, however, only a

trivial part that explains why women were religiously subordinated. The primary justification

was their incapability of attaining the five forms of highest realization as women (also known as

the five obstructions), namely becoming a Buddha, Brahmā god, Indra, Universal Monarch

[Chakravartin], or king of demons (Bloom xxvi). Apart from the five obstructions, women’ three

obedience – women were subordinated to their fathers in youths (by being raised under a

patriarchal system), their husbands in adulthoods (while their husbands could divorce them at all

times and could marry more than one wife, they had to however obey their husbands’ commands

and be loyal to their husbands), and to their sons in old ages (motherhoods are only comparable

to “borrowed womb”[s]) – was also incorporated into traditional Buddhist thoughts (Dobbins

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75). Both the five obstructions and women’s three obedience put forth an implication that

women, lacking in the ability to make the best determination, required masculine assistances.

This is not to say that women’ births to the Pure Land are impossible. Conventional

Buddhist thoughts considered that, in order to pursue a religious path, women had to first despise

their imperfect bodies (Bloom xxvi) and at the same time become men in their next lives

(Dobbins 93), so as to look forward to salvation and freedom. The reason behind was that, in Dr.

Dobbins’s words, “feminine identity itself is an obstacle to Buddhahood.” Women were innately

impure of secretions, such as blood, menstruations; and overwhelming emotions, including

antipathy, hostility, jealousy, sensitivity, and so on (95). They were born with all these feminine

characteristics, which were believed to prohibit women from having religious lives. Therefore, in

order to attain salvation and liberation, they had to get rid of these features by first loathing their

bodies and next becoming males. There were never exceptions in a traditional context.

The asymmetric gender distinction was shaken because of the appearance of Hōnen.

Conventional beliefs of Pure Land Buddhism became out of date as Hōnen brought forth his

insights regarding woman salvation. Deemed that believers should take Pure Land Buddhist

thoughts beyond gender, age, and social status, he taught that everyone is entitled to enter the

Pure Land in the same manner, as long as he or she recited “Homage to Amida Buddha” or

Namu Amida Butsu (Atone 2). To retort the ancient concepts about the five obstructions and

women’ three obedience, Hōnen believed that “the five recitations of nembutsu destroy the five

hindrances for a woman, three recitations of nembutsu eliminate the three types of obedience,

and a single utterance of nembutsu will result in one being welcomed by Amida Buddha into the

Pure Land at the time of one’s death” (Atone 3). Furthermore, in response to the illiteracy of

Japanese women to Chinese, in which most sutras were composed, Hōnen wrote his

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commentaries and publications in Japanese to equip women for religious practice and attainment

(Atone 3). Hōnen came up with this brand new idea, which did not only make him so attractive

to female Buddhists, but also changed the way scholars interpreted Buddhist scriptures.

It, however, does not mean that Hōnen fully supported gender equality. “In the nembutsu

ojoyogisho, he says:

Amida’s Vow was made so that we who live in the latter days of the law may attain ojo.

Do not despair that, because you are women, you are corrupt and sinful… If you believe

deeply in your salvation and chant namu Amida butsu, namu Amida butsu, then good or

not, man or not, ten out of ten, a hundred out of a hundred, all will be saved eventually”

(Machida 11).

As Professor Machida notes in his writing, Renegade Monk Hōnen and Japanese Pure Land

Buddhism, Hōnen did not say that men and women were perfectly equal to each other; he only

asked women to uphold their confidences in achieving enlightenment, regardless of their

corruptness and sinfulness. Moreover, in his renowned preaching to a prostitute in Muronotsu, he

said that “What you are doing is indeed sinful. The retribution for your acts will be

immeasurable; your present fate is due to past karma, and your present evils will surely bring

you an evil future.” With that said, he asked the prostitute to grit her teeth, be brave, and “quit”

(12). Hōnen never expelled the imperfectness of women. The difference between ancient

thoughts and Hōnen’s philosophy is that the former explicated the absurdity of women entering

the Pure Land as women, while the latter claimed that it is actually feasible for women to attain

enlightenment and enter the Pure Land as women, because “women like you [the prostitute] are

the most welcome guests of Amida’s Vow” (12). He did not completely include women into

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Pure Land Buddhism – he only accepted their humanity. Therefore, Hōnen came up with a

conclusion that, although women are born with deficiencies, they can still achieve birth in the

Pure Land as women, had they maintain faith and perform nembutsu wholeheartedly.

Shinran, a disciple of Hōnen, completely accepted Hōnen’s insights. In regard to the

inclusion of women in the attainment of enlightenment, Shinran resorted to Hōnen’s wisdom

about his “reversal of salvation, which prioritized ‘evil’ people.” His viewpoints thus coincided

with those of Hōnen that implicated women as lesser beings (Machida 12). As he once said

“even a good person can attain birth in the Pure Land, how much more readily, then, the person

with bad karma,” he pointed out that we should accept our positions as “wretched beings of deep

evil karma” (Bloom 170). Because of Shinran’s judgment that bad karmas did not prevent one

from attaining enlightenment, this was not in the sense that we were evils, but in that we were

karmically handicapped. Rennyo, the second founder of Shin Buddhism and the descendent of

Shinran, recalled Shinran’s opinion that the marrow of Pure Land Buddhism stemmed from

Other Power (Bloom 170) and that self-power banned a person from approaching this essence, so

he rejected what one’s common sense usually expressed – Since a person with good karmas was

more likely to achieve birth in the Pure Land, a person with bad karmas has no choice but to

accumulate as many good deeds as possible (Bloom 99) – He turned the logic upside down,

asserting that a person with good karmas is too obsessed with morals, customs, and values, such

that he or she “fail to entrust themselves to Other Power,” which is the essence to enlightenment.

In the other way around, a person who realizes his or her impurities often relies on Other Power

and thus is capable of reaching the Pure Land. Dr. Bloom quotes one of the Shinran’s teachings

in his The Shin Buddhist Classical Tradition A Reader in Pure Land Teaching (Volume 1) that

“those who slander the right dharma” would fail to achieve enlightenment and liberation (104).

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Expounding upon this profound concept, it is explicit that women who practices the nembutsu

with faith and aspiration for enlightenment while at the same time devalues their existences as

women will attain salvation and achieve birth in the Pure Land (Dobbins 97); and the rebirth is

conducted “without the loss of body” (Bloom 135), that is entering the Pure Land as women.

This stance adhered to what Shinran’s master, Hōnen, once said to a notorious lady that “Amida

Buddha established the universal vow in order to embrace an undesirable person such as you [the

lady]” (Atone 3). In short, Shinran preserved the orthodoxy that relegated women to an inferior

position, but affirmed that it was exactly this subjugation that brought women to an

unprecedented ranking in Pure Land Buddhism.

As a matter of fact, while women were culturally and historically subordinated and

regarded as low-grade, they did not see themselves in a pessimistic way, especially when it

comes to Pure Land Buddhism in the time of Hōnen and Shinran. Instead, most of them

developed and recognized an alternative principle which was cheerfully and sanguinely derived

from Pure Land Buddhist thoughts, which, unlike some forms of Buddhism, did not blindly

target on men. One flawless example of such thoughts is the exposition of the experience of

Queen Vaidehi on aspiring, meditating, visualizing for, and finally achieving birth in the Pure

Land in the Contemplation Sutra. In Dr. Dobbins’s words, it “legitimated womanhood as a bona

fide vessel of spirituality in the minds of women” (94). Thanks to the effort of Hōnen and

Shinran, women saw Pure Land Buddhism a religion open to all and thus had long been willing

to contribute to the wide variety of religious services, ranging from the reproduction of scriptures

and the organization and arrangement of worships and rituals, to the production of paintings,

sketches, status, et cetera and the building of temples. Rather than accepted the status quo,

women appreciated the negative portrayal on them and embraced the teachings of Amida

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Buddha positively and optimistically. They “acknowledge[d] the religious flaws attributed to

them” (99). Because of Hōnen and Shinran, who had been endeavored for fostering senses of

adaptation and inclusion among women, the way the world analyzed Buddhist sutras changed.

Through the effort of the two eminent religious leaders, it is finally understood that as long as

women acknowledge their imperfectness and bad karmas and thus cling to Other Power with full

faith, they can definitely be reborn in the Pure Land as women, in spite of the sin of inferiority

Amida Buddha affixed to them.

After all, “discrimination arose due to the historical, social, cultural, and racial norms”

(Atone 3) of the epoch. Speaking of that, it is not the scriptures, sutras, or preaching that

supported discrimination, but it is the manner they were interpreted before that shaped the entire

sexist attitudes which permeated the community. Consistently advanced and accentuated by

Hōnen and Shinran, the idea that women can be reborn in the Pure Land as women has been a

revolutionary breakthrough. Though their philosophies did not liberate women from religious

sexism, such that female Buddhists still have the obligations to endure all the prejudices that

point towards their deficits of masculinity and that male Buddhists may still maintain a disdain

for the deficiencies of women, the two prominent pioneers had at least overturned the traditions,

which surmised that women were welcome to the Pure Land if and only if they first transformed

into men, and created a perception that women can pursue a religious life, make a spiritual

progress, attain enlightenment, and achieve salvation and liberation – as women.

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Works cited

Atone, Joji, and Yoko Hayashi. The Promise of Amida Buddha: Hōnen's Path to Bliss.

Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2011. Print.

Dobbins, James C. Letters of the Nun Eshinni: Images of Pure Land Buddhism in

Medieval Japan. Honolulu: U of Hawai'i, 2004. Print.

Machida, Soho, and Ioannis Mentzas. Renegade Monk Hōnen and Japanese Pure Land

Buddhism. Berkeley: U of California, 1999. Print.

Tanaka, Kenneth K. The Shin Buddhist Classical Tradition A Reader in Pure Land

Teaching (Volume 1). Ed. Alfred Bloom. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. Lanham: World Wisdom, 2014. Print.