Religion in medieval Japanand the promotion of other popular forms of religious literature about Hokkeji. Monastic society
from the mid- Heian period onward tended to treat women primarily as potential patrons, but
Eison, Myō’e, and some masters in the Zen lineages—especially recently arrived Chinese Chan
masters—began to treat women additionally as followers in their traditions.^30
Meanwhile, the True Pure Land lineages (Jōdo Shinshū) from their very beginning featured
clerical marriage, based on Shinran’s original vision of Kannon promising to take the form of a
woman to lead him to the Pure Land as his death. The wife of any priest in these lineages was
referred to as bōmori or “temple guardian,” and described as “proprietor” of the local dōjō site
where the congregation gathered.^31 Alternative gender identities also existed in medieval Bud-
dhism but have only recently become an object of research.^32
Kami- Buddha discourses and practices
Scholars have long recognized that in the early medieval era, a series of figures within the devel-
oping Buddhist institutions, the court, and the warrior class increasingly reconceived the ritual
and discursive relationship between Buddhas and a series of deities (shin, or kami) associated with
both native and continental traditions. Attention has, however, recently been turned to the fact
that the development of Kami- Buddha (shinbutsu) combinatory discourse seems to have occurred
in connection to religious institutions rather than as an independent irruption in the religious
landscape; at the same time, scholars no longer generally assume that such belief or practice was
either a mark of inconsistency or corruption, on the one hand, or contrary to modernity.^33 A
broad set of deities came to be associated with Buddhist temples and their divinities, in connec-
tion with Buddhist cosmological discourse that, while originally placing the kami as un-
enlightened beings in need of salvation or protectors of the Dharma, came to represent varied
kami as local traces or emanations of specific Buddhas and Bodhisattvas,^34 among which one was
Amaterasu, promoted as identical with the Buddha Dainichi since the mid- to-late eleventh
century.^35
Alan Grapard and several Japanese scholars have emphasized the importance of the royal
court’s developing twenty- two shrine system and its direct association with major Buddhist
monasteries.^36 Figures at the major religious complexes claimed that deities at or near their sites
were local traces of Buddhist divinities, especially tutelary deities like Hie Sannō (Mount Hiei)
and Seiryū Gongen (Daigoji) and particularly in connection with specific practices such as rain-
making.^37 Meanwhile, texts outlining the Buddhist royal- consecration rite sokui kanjō and rites of
the protector- monks (gojisō) of the sovereign incorporated the deities and their shrines into Bud-
dhist practice. Shingon monks and others close to the court conceived of Tenshō Daijin (Amat-
erasu), the deity of the royal family housed at Ise, as equivalent with the highest esoteric Buddha,
Dainichi Nyorai, and spawned lineages of “Ise Shintō” within religious institutions; within
Tendai, similar developments promoted the deity Sannō of the Hie (alt. Hiyoshi) shrine at the
foot of Mount Hiei.^38
In the fields of Shintō studies, intellectual history, and Buddhist studies, the effort to interpret
kami (shin) worship increasingly from a historical rather than theological perspective began in the
early twentieth century, and became more prominent in the 1970s with the inclusion of “medi-
eval Shintō” texts in the Nihon shisō taikei series reproducing works thought to influence Japanese
intellectual history as well as Kuroda Toshio’s argument that historical Shintō was an outgrowth
of the Kenmitsu Buddhist system. No clear historical alternative has been offered to the latter
view, but as Itō Satoshi has recently emphasized, his work and that of others have attempted to
historicize “Shintō” while considering it within the larger framework of native practice and the
development of Kami- Buddha combinatory discourse (shinbutsu shūgō) such as that associated