Women, Sexuality, and Enlightenment: Kankyo no Tomo

Abstract

A MONG the many collections of Buddhist setsuwa SE, medieval tales or anecdotes, is a scarcely studied text titled Kankyo no Tomo Mf A 'A Companion in Solitude', a work believed to have been written by Priest Keisei R, 1189-1268, in 1222. A striking feature of this collection is that many of its stories concern women and their search for religious enlightenment. There are few representations of women and conceptions of their redemptive potential in the popular medieval religious texts of Japan. Keisei's work therefore offers a rare insight into the complex and often contradictory ways in which women, their bodies, their sexuality, and their social and domestic functions were constructed in medieval writing. The Buddhist attitude to the status of women was by no means monolithic and unchanging. The early Indian Buddhist texts are marked by 'a tension between certain attitudes that seem unusually positive in their assessment of women and the feminine, on the one hand, and attitudes that are much more blatantly negative, on the other.' In Mahayana canonical literature there are several contesting representations of women and the soteriological path open to them. One widely found assertion in the scriptures is that women cannot become bodhisattvas and eventual buddhas without first being reborn as men. Another motif that appears in the canon is the theme of sexual transformation. The wisdom of women on the path to enlightenment can be identified owing to a sexual change in which they lose their female characteristics and acquire a male body. While the avowed Buddhist goal is to transcend sexuality altogether, it is female sexuality that becomes a major impediment, while 'maleness' is the prerequisite for enlightenment.