Paper short abstract:

The story of Monk Mongaku's conversion in certain versions of the Tales of the Heike features a story of female chastity conspicuously lifted from the Chinese tradition. We explore the process by which it was imported and the ways in which it is being presented and appraised here.

Paper long abstract:

Some versions of the Tales of the Heike, like the Engyō bon or the Gempei jōsuiki, feature the story of the religious awakening of the monk Mongaku, who first convinced Minamoto no Yoritomo to raise his rebellion against the Heike. In secular life he was Endō Moritō, and he was in love with a married woman. The woman's parents happen to be living as hostages of Moritō, so if she refuses his advances their lives will be in danger (or, alternately, her parents order her to betray her husband and remarry with Moritō), and naturally if she accepts then she will offend against her husband. Caught in this double bind, the woman tells Moritō to kill her husband but then takes his place, so that Moritō unwittingly kills her instead. In horror at what he has done, Moritō becomes a monk under the name Mongaku. This story is lifted from Liu Xiang's Biographies of Exemplary Women, which entered Japan via the commentarial tradition for Filial Exemplars by the same author, then spread widely in the setsuwa tradition: Konjaku 10:21, Chūkōsen 1:67, Kingyoku yōshū 4, etc. Finally, it becomes the basis for this story in certain Heike variants, but it is always followed by the original Chinese story, or in the Nagato bon and the Nanto bon the woman herself references the Chinese story in an aside. In this paper, I argue that the Tales of the Heike present this Chinese story as a citational point of reference not for the composition of the story of Mongaku's conversion, but rather for the woman within the story as she chooses her course of action. I also show how the Engyō bon in particular has changed the conflict between filial piety and justice, to one between filial piety and chastity, and argue that this is typical of an early-medieval emphasis on the "chaste woman" as seen in the story of Tian Dan in the Records of the Grand Historian, and of a view of women found consistently in the unique portions of the Engyō bon Heike in particular.