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----- Original Message -----
From: "Monika Lehner" <
monika.lehner@UNIVIE.AC.AT>
To: <
H-ASIA@H-NET.MSU.EDU>
Sent: Tuesday, February 05, 2013 1:52 PM
Subject: H-ASIA: Thursday at AAS: Early Modern Japan Network, Panel I
> H-ASIA
> February 5, 2013
>
> Thursday at AAS: Early Modern Japan Network, Panel I
> ******************************************************************
>
> From: "Patrick R. Schwemmer" <pschwemm@Princeton.EDU>
>
> EMJNet at the AAS, San Diego
>
> Once again EMJNet will present two scholarly panels at the AAS Annual
> Meeting in San Diego in addition to sponsoring two more at the main AAS
> meeting itself. We have a good bit to offer, but it is all bunched up on
> Thursday and Friday, so plan to come early!
>
> Overview
>
> Time: Thursday, 1:00 – 5:00 p.m.<x-apple-data-detectors://0>
>
> Place: Edward D
>
> Panel I: The Gender of Early Modern Japanese Buddhism, 1640-1882
>
> Abstracts
>
> Panel I:
>
> The Gender of Early Modern Japanese Buddhism, 1640-1882
>
> If Buddhism in early modern Japan has proven a topic peripheral to most
> scholars of Japanese religion and to scholars of Edo history alike, then
> our understanding of gender within Edo Buddhism lags still further behind.
> While scholarship has illuminated the roles of women in some Edo-era new
> religious movements, for instance, gender as a problem within the
> historical study of "establishment Buddhism" has so far attracted little
> attention. This panel showcases the results of research that takes gender
> seriously as a critical category for the study of early modern Buddhism.
> Eschewing the all-too-common approach of "add women and stir," this panel
> does not merely focus attention on nuns and other female practitioners.
> Rather, it shows how broad thinking about gender helps to address existing
> problems in Edo religious history. This panel illustrates how changing
> notions of gender inflected the emergence of the status (mibun) system and
> legal battles among Buddhist institutions. It shows how different gender
> identities, both privileged and not, could be hindrances or conveyances in
> the common Edo-era practice of religious travel. It reveals that
> conspicuously gendered modes of expression formed part of an ongoing
> historicist search for knowledge of past Buddhist practice as grounding
> for the present. In this way, it demonstrates that gender is one key to
> understanding the complex ritual, social, and ideological roles of
> Buddhism in early modern Japan, and to understanding early modern Japan as
> a whole.
>
> Nuns at the Intersection of Status and Gender: The Conflicts and
> Compromises of Daihongan's Nuns in Early Modern Japan
>
> Matt Mitchell, Duke University
>
> Scholarship has demonstrated that status (mibun) was the central
> organizing feature of early modern society in Japan. Despite the extensive
> examination of various status groups over the past thirty years, work
> detailing women's places within the status system has been sparse. This is
> particularly true in the case of Buddhist nuns: Only a few articles
> examine nuns and status, and they focus on the early seventeenth century.
> However, as Amy Stanley points out in Selling Women, conceptions of women
> and their places in the status system were in flux even through the late
> seventeenth century. Because of this, early seventeenth-century nuns were
> able to act and interact with monks and laypeople very differently from
> their later successors. Therefore, in order to fully understand nuns'
> roles and places in early modern Japan, we must first understand how
> concepts of gender and their status as Buddhist clerics became solidified
> in the late seventeenth century.
>
> In this presentation, I use published and unpublished temple documents to
> examine a series of lawsuits from the middle of the seventeenth to the
> early eighteenth centuries. These cases, which determined the sectarian
> identity and administrative shape of the popular pilgrimage temple Zenkōji
> throughout the early modern period, were between its chief sub-temples:
> the Daihongan convent (of the Pure Land school) and the Daikanjin
> monastery (of the Tendai school). As I demonstrate, these conflicts and
> compromises also fixed gender and status boundaries for Daihongan's nuns,
> circumscribing their roles within the Zenkōji temple complex for the
> remainder of the Edo period.
>
> Bringing the Center to the Periphery: Buddhist Travel as the Extension of
> Masculine Authority
>
> Gina Cogan, Boston University
>
> Scholars have long studied Edo era religious travel, but like any
> pilgrims, they tend to follow only the well-traveled routes. Thus, lay
> pilgrims to sacred sites like Ise, as well as low-ranking itinerant
> Buddhist preachers, feature prominently in existing work. We know less
> about lecture tours by eminent monks. This is a troubling omission, since
> the travel of clerics like the Rinzai Zen reformer Hakuin (1686-1769)
> stands in sharp contrast to trips by itinerant preachers. Unlike those
> peripatetic figures, Hakuin spent years as the abbot of his home temple,
> Shōinji, setting out to preach only after he turned sixty. Even then, he
> periodically returned home to administer the temple and teach his
> disciples. This paper seeks to understand Hakuin's travels in gendered
> terms. It argues that Hakuin's time at Shōinji, a homosocial community and
> a site of ascetic meditative practice, gave him the religious capital that
> served him as a "travel pass." This enabled him to voyage through Japan
> with no loss of status, and to avoid being grouped with the itinerant
> preachers, who were marked as marginal. Roads are often associated with
> liminality, in the language of Victor Turner, but here too Hakuin offers a
> striking exception. His time on the road did not place him in a liminal
> state, but instead extended his abbacy throughout Japan, affording him the
> opportunity to preach to his traveling companions just as he did at his
> home temple. Status, masculinity, and patronage all combined to make
> Hakuin one of the most popular monks of his day.
>
> The Nun Kōgetsu and the Gender of Buddhist Historicism in Late Edo Japan
>
> Micah Auerback, University of Michigan
>
> Although today overshadowed by the towering figure of her monastic master
> Jiun Onkō (1718-1804), the late Edo-era intellectual and expert in
> monastic discipline Kōgetsu Sōgi (1755-1833) also promoted a historicist
> vision of Buddhism in her own right. While Jiun lived, Kōgetsu transcribed
> and edited his teachings about the life of Śākyamuni, the historical
> Buddha. In 1830, long after Jiun's death, she published her own original
> illustrated literary biography of the Buddha, The Light of the Three
> Realms (Miyo no hikari). Here Kōgetsu wrote in a classicizing and overtly
> "feminine" style. She grounded her tale in the novel historicist
> scholarship pioneered by Jiun. In doing so, she explicitly attempted to
> counter and "correct" the vernacular variations of the Buddha's life story
> circulating in Japan in her day. Republished in 1882 with the imprimatur
> of the early Meiji Buddhist reformer Fukuda Gyōkai (1809-1888), The Light
> of the Three Realms went on to assume a new role within the Meiji era
> effort to revive and reform Buddhism. This presentation locates Kōgetsu's
> work in the context of Edo-period historicism in its Buddhist guise. It
> considers how Kōgetsu's position as a nun speaking to the commercial
> reading public influenced her intellectual work. It further suggests the
> notably wide scope of Kōgetsu's work, showing that it reached as far back
> in time as ancient India, and suggesting that it speaks to the continuing
> preoccupation with the Buddha today.
>
> Respondent: Barbara Ambros, Religious Studies
>
> The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
>
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