In 1688, a precept platform built on the grounds of the Rinzai Zen convent Enshōji gave women the opportunity to become ordained as nuns outside of a monastery for the first time in almost 400 years. The establishment of the platform freed women from dependence on male-controlled monasteries and made it possible for nuns to ordain subsequent generations at their own convent (p. 224). Gina Cogan's The Princess Nun tells the story of Emperor Go-Mizunoo's daughter Bunchi, the nun who founded Enshōji and who considered the construction of said precept platform “the crowning achievement of her career” (p. 1). Cogan's work, the first dedicated biographical study of an Edo period Japanese nun, sheds light on the world of Buddhist women in early modern Japan. The Princess Nun provides a corrective to earlier narratives that relegated convents to the margins and assumed that they were irrelevant to larger socio-political-economic realities. Drawing on court diaries, letters, Bunchi's autobiography, and Bunchi's hagiography, Cogan offers new insight into the relationships between seventeenth-century Buddhist convents, monasteries, the court, and the shogunate. Cogan's informative work will interest specialists, graduate students, and undergraduates with strong backgrounds in Japanese history or Japanese Buddhism.
Cogan explores the means by which Bunchi was constituted as different as an ascetic nun, while also recognizing that Bunchi exercised agency by supporting, not subverting, normative social values. Bunchi married at a young age, along with many of her peers, but when the marriage failed and Bunchi began making decisions about the course of her own life, it was “the beginning of Bunchi's life as an unconventional person” (p. 48). While the majority of her thirty younger half-siblings entered imperial monastic institutions, most did so at a young age as an alternative to marriage. Therefore it was unusual for Bunchi to take the tonsure at twenty-one, and even more unexpected for her to build a convent where not only could she take an authoritative role as an abbess, but also women could enjoy an unprecedented opportunity to engage in a Zen monastic life. Bunchi modeled the practice at Enshōji after the practices of reformist male clerics like her teacher Isshi, wearing plain robes, establishing strict regulations for her community, and moving her convent increasingly far from the court. As Cogan observes, “Bunchi, who came back to the court from afar, wearing plain robes, was more like Isshi than she was like any of her clerical relatives. She served as a model of a different way of being an imperial nun” (p. 114). Due to Bunchi's high regard for monastic ideals, the religious community she created was designed for elite practitioners who could dedicate themselves to an ascetic lifestyle. Cogan notes that “had Bunchi been successful in her reform, even fewer women would have been able to practice as nuns” (p. 3). Cogan has introduced us to a conservative reformer, not a revolutionary, whose gender limited her influence on institutional Rinzai Zen, but who still had significant influence on the court and shogunate.
Chapters 1 and 2 explore Bunchi's life as a child and young married woman in the politically charged seventeenth-century Buddhist court. Chapters 3 and 4 follow the battle between political, royal, and Buddhist agents that raged over defining Buddhism, and discuss its impact on Bunchi's Buddhist education. Chapter 5 introduces Buddhist attitudes towards the female body that prevented Bunchi from engaging in communal monastic training with her male teacher, Isshi, and circumscribed their relationship even as Isshi praised her for surpassing her sex as a “female manly person” (p. 116). In chapters 6 through 9, Cogan discusses Bunchi's creation of Enshōji, a project that spanned three successive locations and culminated in the construction of the bodhisattva precept platform. Chapter 10 shows how Bunchi's reclusion, regulations, and ordination platform gained her support from women of the shogunal cluster and a position of authority over other imperial abbesses. We also see how Bunchi and her colleague Chimyō Jōin ensured her legacy by authoring an autobiography and hagiography that added to Enshōji's prestige and helped the convent survive her death.
Cogan engages with scholars from Bernard Faure to Lori Meeks to bring Bunchi and Enshōji into the limelight, adding the latter to a growing collection of scholarship on convents, including the medieval institution of Hokkeiji and early modern divorce convents such as Mantokuji and Tōkeiji. If Cogan sometimes leaves us wondering about Bunchi the individual as she explores the world surrounding Bunchi, it can be attributed to both a paucity of resources and her interest in placing Bunchi within her historical context. Reading Patricia Fister's article on Bunchi's usage of bodily relics and blood sutra writing will help readers understand Bunchi's personal practice.Footnote 12 We may also wonder about the state of affairs at contemporary Enshōji, as Bunchi's convent not only survived Bunchi's death and the tumultuous Meiji period, but “remains an active convent” (p. 255). Cogan has nevertheless made a significant contribution to Tokugawa Buddhist studies, and we can look forward to responses to her challenge for scholars to undertake “more studies of monastic institutions for women in the Tokugawa period” (p. 257).
