Paper short abstract:

An ethnographic account of female Buddhist priests in localized contexts in contemporary Japan.

Paper long abstract:

This talk represents a small segment of a larger project collecting "Biographies of Non-eminent monks." In response to the general trend in Buddhist studies to date to focus on exemplars of the tradition, I am concerned with uncovering stories of "ordinary" priests, both male and female. It is my contention that these lives are, in fact, both extraordinary and significant in what they can teach us about how temple Buddhism is lived. By focusing here on female priests, I argue that their experiences are illustrative of and inseparable from the broader context of institutional Buddhism. This point seems obvious, but it carries significant implications. Female priests experience temple Buddhism in ways that are both distinctive from and continuous with those of male priests. I thus avoid isolating their stories solely in terms of female experience. Simply replacing extraordinary men with extraordinary women gets us no closer to how the vast majority of priests experience their traditions. When we look at female priests not simply for insights into how their experiences differ from men's, but rather take their stories on their own merits, we discover a Buddhist world that is both familiar and unknown, one with new landmarks, coastlines, and boundaries.