Rethinking Body, Woman, Sex, and Agency in Medieval Japa nese Narratives

ed from society, and often in opposition to it. When medieval texts speak of onna no mi they mean more than the physical and sexed body that makes for womanhood; for both her mental and emotional attributes as well as her relationship to others as a social being are involved in the constitution of what we might call the female body/self. The body in the medieval context was not something set in stone, where the distinction between man and woman was predetermined by their respective sexual characteristics; neither the body nor nature was seen as inert and passive matter with immutable attributes. This was of profound significance with farreaching consequences, for it meant that medieval bodies were granted transformative powers that rendered the boundaries between gods, humans, and beasts porous and fluid. Both within canonical texts as well as in pop u lar narratives, women and their bodies became shapeshifting forms that defied any consolidation of “woman” as a stable entity. If the Lotus Sutra made rebirth as a man one of the conditions for attaining enlightenment,43 the Vimalakirti Sutra argued that viewed from within the Buddhist doctrine of nonduality, neither maleness nor femaleness could be seen as innate or stable characteristics, thereby attesting to the provisional nature of gendered identities.44 In many Buddhist texts, women who lure men into the trap of attachment are revealed to be bodhisattvas, and beautiful women turn out to be fox spirits or demons, seamlessly crossing the boundaries between the human and nonhuman worlds.45 “Woman” in the Buddhist schema was at once singled out by a particularity that marked her as different. She was hindered by the five obstructions; her beauty was dangerous for men who had chosen the path of renunciation; her body was marked by the impurities of childbirth and menstruation. At the same time, woman could never be an unchanging and essentialist category, always fixed in the same way. For all bodies, even those of women, far from being “the flat, horizontal, immovable foundation of physical fact: sex,” 46 were conceptualized as active agents that could defy common expectations and perform miraculous transformations, thereby attesting to the power of the Buddhist faith. That women were positioned as different from men, and that they were not their equals, is beyond dispute. This does not, however, render Buddhism misogynist, if by that term we mean a conscious and willful hatred of women by men. Rethinking Body, Woman, Sex, and Agency 25 In a world that was both naturally and socially (understood not as two separate realms) hierarchically ordered, Buddhists assumed that women were lesser than men, and there was little need to justify this “truth” by making women the objects of sustained attack through polemical treatises and learned disquisitions. While it is true that women’s shortcomings and sinful dispositions were often used in Buddhist discourse, what these writings sought to highlight was not women’s inferiority to men but rather the nature of the profound hurdles that had to be overcome in order to attain salvation. In other words, “woman” served as a kind of placeholder, who made possible the playing out of questions and solutions that were central to the Buddhist project. Buddhist texts creatively used the topos of “woman” (marked by par tic u lar shortcomings and failings, but only provisionally so), as a skillful means, a hōben, if you will, to demonstrate the miraculous powers of the Buddhist teachings, which made enlightenment possible for all beings. In the pro cess, what they revealed, through the topos of woman, was the temporary and provisional nature of all that seemed real in the mundane world of samsāra. This may be one way of reading the drama that unfolds in the Devadatta chapter of the Lotus Sutra, in which one of the Buddha’s disciples, Sāriputra, expresses doubts about the eightyearold daughter of the dragon king possessing the necessary requisites for attaining Buddhahood on the grounds that the female body was a “filthy” thing, subject to the five obstructions. It is by overturning this narrative and recounting how the dragon girl swiftly transforms herself into a man and eventually achieves Buddhahood that Manjusri demonstrates the shifting boundaries between men, women, dragons, and buddhas. The rhetorical tour de force acquires its par tic u lar potency from the use of “woman” as a particularly graphic instance of the ways in which conventional and supposedly unchangeable realities can be overturned and reversed.47 It is in this sense that the figure of “woman” is structurally central to the soteriological aims of the Lotus Sutra. Discussions about women in setsuwa narratives, while ostensibly about women, also suggest an order of inquiry in which the central point of interest is not women qua women. What might be the best way to make one’s way in this world, and ensure one’s salvation in the next; how to outsmart one’s partner; how to make sense of events that befall one; what might be learned by being attentive to the intricate workings of karma? It is these mundane predicaments, attendant on living in the world of samsāra, that often find expression through narratives about women. Their pedagogical value goes beyond proselytizing exclusively to real women, for the textual figure of woman in these tales is a powerful reminder to men and women alike of the miraculous transformations that faith can effect.