Going with the flow and yet controlling the Flow: the Early Life, Education, and Scholarship of Takatsukasa Seigyoku, Current Abbess of Zenkōji’s Daihongan Convent

Abstract

Takatsukasa Seigyoku (b. 1929) is the current abbess of Daihongan convent, which is one of the two administrative heads of the popular Japanese pilgrimage temple Zenkōji. In this paper, I analyze Takatsukasa’s autobiographical materials about her early life, her monastic education, and her scholarly works. Her early life, here defined as the time from her birth until 1979, demonstrates the ways in which she asserted or relaxed control over her life at various times, following her motto “going with the flow and yet controlling the flow.” Her education at the Pure Land Nuns’ Sectarian School brings to light the ways that women come to embody being a nun. Her scholarship demonstrates the ways that biographical narratives can function to create ideals within the monastic community, while at the same time, they place Takatsukasa’s convent and the tradition she is a part of within the larger (mostly male) historic record. I also analyze media accounts about her ordination in 1955. From these accounts we can determine that Japanese society’s views about nuns (and laywomen, as well) in mid-century combined elements of medieval understandings of taking the tonsure as a sad event with twentieth-century discourses that defined women’s roles to be “good wives and wise mothers.” Additionally, we can see how Takatsukasa has reclaimed the narrative of her life through writing autobiographical materials, effectively challenging the interpretations of her life produced in newspapers and magazines.