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The Relationship between Bunchi and Isshi, Two Seventeenth-Century Japanese Zen Clerics

Gina CoganBoston University

Draft: Please do not cite or circulate without permission.

The following is the end of chapter five and the entirety of chapter six of my forthcoming book, The Princess Nun: Bunchi, Precept Reform, and Court Ritual in Seventeenth-Century Japan.

The nun Bunchi Daitsū was born in 1619 and lived until 1697. The eldest daughter of the sovereign Go-Mizunoo (1596-1680), she married at age twelve, in 1631. Her spouse, the courtier Takatsukasa Norihira (1608-1668), was also her first cousin. The duration of the marriage is disputed, but it is likely that it ended by 1636, when Bunchi was seventeen. She became more and more serious about Buddhist practice and took the tonsure 1640, under the Rinzai Zen monk Isshi Bunshu (1608-1646). After her tonsure, Bunchi founded a Rinzai Zen convent, Enshōji, in the Shūgakuin area of Kyoto. She moved the convent to Nara in 1655, the result of her father's decision to build a retreat nearby the Shūgakuin location of Enshōji. Enshōji was located first in the Yashima area of Nara, moving to an adjoining plot of land in the Yamamura district in 1669. Enshōji is still at this site and still an active convent.

Bunchi and Isshi

Another significant factor in Bunchi’s decision to become a nun was her

relationship with Isshi Bunshu. The previous chapter described his close relationship

with Go-Mizunoo and it was through this relationship that Bunchi met him and became

his student. Although Isshi died in 1646, his teachings were the single most important

influence on Bunchi’s style of Buddhist practice. She devoted her career to extending

and deepening his Zen by making Enshōji a place of strict practice, with various sets of

rules, and by building an ordination platform at Yashima Enshōji. She situated Enshōji at

a distance from the palace so as to enact his recommendation that she practice away from

the worldly distractions of the capital. In turn, Isshi took seriously his job as Bunchi’s

Cogan 2 Bunchi and Isshi

teacher and mentor. He wrote her letters filled with advice and wrote poems to

commemorate important events in her career as a nun.

The exchange in their relationship can be seen in the Fumonsan no ki. Here she

wrote, on the occasion of the founding of Enshōji: “I sincerely venerate the great virtues

of [Bucchō] kokushi. He wrote a verse that said ‘raising several rafters for a small Zen

residence, first you have clothing and a bowl, then celebratory incense. Make good on

your long-held aspiration to leave the dust of the world, prepare the protecting leaves and

learn from Nanyō.’”1 Bunchi quoted the encouraging verse from Isshi that validates her

choice to practice far from the dust of the world, as we will see in the next chapter.

Go-Mizunoo first became interested in Isshi through Konoe Nobuhiro. Isshi was

serving as teacher to Nobuhiro and another courtier, Karasuma Mitsuhiro, in 1632, the

year after Bunchi married Norihira. After about 1634, Isshi began coming to Kyoto

frequently to meet with Go-Mizunoo and his other students and to give dharma talks.

Chimyō wrote of Bunchi’s first encounter with Isshi:

The sovereign invited Bucchō kokushi [Isshi] to question him on the essentials of the law. Bunchi was in the assembly, and one time while she was sitting and listening, she was deeply moved and tears coursed down her face. She asked if she could be his student. The sovereign realized that he could not hinder her aspirations, and gave his permission. She took the tonsure under kokushi at the age of twenty-one and presently, she took off her rare and expensive [robes] and assumed linen ones.2

1 Nanyō (Ch. Nanyang) was a monk active in eighth century China. Mochizuki Shinkyō, Bukkyō daijiten 10 vols. (Kyoto: Seikai Seiten Kankō Kyōkai, 1955-1963), 2683c. The phrase “protecting leaves” is an allusion to the name of Bunchi’s residence, the Yōyōan, or hermitage of the embracing leaves.

2 Suenaga and Nishibori, Bunchi nyoō, 132.


It is difficult to date this narrative based on other events in Bunchi’s life, but the most

likely possibility is that she met Isshi after 1634, after Go-Mizunoo’s patronage

intensified. Assuming Bunchi was married from 1631 to 34, this would have been just as

the marriage was ending, but, as we saw above, Chimyō described this period of

Bunchi’s life as one in which she practiced Buddhism at the palace, wanting to be a nun

but prevented by her father’s opposition. It is entirely possible that this was actually what

happened, but it is also possible, if we follow the timeline that had her leaving her

marriage in 1634, that Bunchi left her marriage because she was unhappy in it, and

gradually came to be more devoted to Buddhism as she studied with Isshi. This would

explain the six-year gap between her marriage and her tonsure, since it would mean that

her interest in Buddhism and desire to be a nun developed gradually as the result of study

and devotion, and perhaps the loss of her mother in 1638. This is not how Chimyō

wanted us to see Bunchi’s interest in Buddhism, since it did not fit his hagiographic

approach. His Bunchi could not have been confused or at a loss for what to do after

leaving her husband. Bunchi, by omitting any mention of her life before she became a

nun also dismissed any possible period of questioning or interest in court life as irrelevant

to her identity.

Bunchi’s Tonsure

Bunchi was ordained as a nun on October 10, 1640. Isshi performed the

ceremony and gave her the name Daitsū Bunchi. He presented her with a verse that said:

“Born among those of the highest status, you are a female jōbu. Remove yourself to a

place far from the dust of the world and leave this realm of confusion. If you guard your


beginner’s spirit for ten years, keeping it fresh, you will surely meet Bodhidharma.”3

This is virtually the only information available about her ordination. Nobuhiro did not

mention it in his diary, and it does not seem to show up in other courtier diaries of the

time. Bunchi did not mention it in the Fumonsan no ki and it is not clear where it took

place, who attended, or what precepts Isshi used in granting this ordination.

In his biography of Bunchi, Chimyō did not discuss the precepts used at her

ordination. It is highly unlikely that they were the prātimokṣa precepts of the

Shibunritsu, because it seems that Isshi was the only monk present at her ordination and

this kind of ordination required more than one monk.4 There is some evidence that

Bunchi initially took the five precepts of a lay person. In a letter Isshi wrote to Bunchi

that is preserved in his Goroku, he made reference to this fact, saying “you were

originally born in the most respected and most elite family, and not shut up in a cage of

the luxury of the world, on the outside you keep the pure precepts [the five pure precepts

of a lay person], and on the inside you polish your Buddha mind.”5 In this passage, Isshi

praised Bunchi for having left the confines of the elite world, which he knew intimately,

having been born into it, albeit on a lower level than Bunchi. The text of this passage

simply reads “pure precepts” but in the commentary, the editor of the Goroku said that in

another version of this work, the characters indicating the five lay precepts were included

above the characters for pure precepts.6 It is impossible to know whether this was 3 Isshi, Goroku, 223. Suenaga and Nishibori, Bunchi nyoō, 16. They mentioned that it

was preserved in a box with a note that said Bunchi received it at her ordination, and she hoped it would be preserved forever.


5 Isshi, Goroku, 86.



accurate or simply the surmise of the editor, but the distinction is important. If Bunchi

took precepts that have been seen, both by contemporaries of Bunchi and by scholars

today, as primarily intended for lay men and women, then we have two options: to take

the position that taking these precepts was indeed sufficient to make one a cleric, male or

female, and Bunchi had one significant ordination early in life, or, to understand that

Bunchi was ordained again, with full nun precepts, sometime later, and that this

supplemental ordination was never recorded. Bunchi did in fact take the bodhisattva

precepts in grand ceremonies at Enshōji, but these occurred decades after its founding

and long after the time that she would, as abbess, have felt the need to take more

precepts, had she not felt or been fully qualified. Multiple bodhisattva precept

ordinations were popular in early modern Japan, so Bunchi might well have taken them

many times during her life, in order to renew her commitment to the bodhisattva path and

to form a karmic link, or kechien, with the person granting them to her.

If Bunchi did take five lay precepts and considered herself to be a full-fledged

nun, then contemporary scholars need to rethink the definition of a nun or a monk in

premodern Japan. There has long been a hierarchy of precepts; the men and women who

have not had access, for one reason or another, to the precepts and ordination traditions at

the top of the hierarchy, have been often seen, by contemporary scholars in particular, as

less than full clerics. Yet, what made Bunchi a nun was not simply the precepts but the

practice. She considered herself a full nun; Isshi considered her one; her father, the

sovereign, did as well. The precepts alone did not define her identity. Her identity as a

nun and abbess of Enshōji existed because of the ordination ceremony, the life she led

after her tonsure, the clothing she wore, the place she lived, the sources of her economic


support, the rituals she did, the sutras she read, and the authority she exerted over the

other women in her community.

If she did not take the five precepts when Isshi ordained her; if, in fact, the “pure

precepts” mentioned in Isshi’s letter were the full set of bodhisattva precepts, the point

that precepts were not the sole defining characteristic of a nun is still valid. It was not the

taking of the pure precepts (however they might be understood), but the whole complex

of her practices that made Bunchi a nun.

Once Bunchi became a nun, her relationship to Isshi changed. She remained his

student, but she became a fellow renunciant, someone on the same path as Isshi, despite

her youth, inexperience, and female sex. She was determined to tread that path in the

same way as Isshi, to the full extent of her ability, and he encouraged her until his death

in 1646, just six years after Bunchi took the tonsure. Although Bunchi’s side of the

correspondence is not extant, Bunchi evidently wrote to Isshi lamenting the fact that she

had a female body and wishing that she had a male one so she could practice with Isshi.

Isshi’s two responses, letters to Bunchi on the topic of her desire to have a male body,

have been preserved, one in his Goroku and the other in a private archive that was then

transferred to the Kyoto National Museum. Contemporary scholars have either ignored

these letters or interpreted them to mean that Bunchi loved Isshi, or that they shared a

resentment of the shogunate. Instead of formulating a decisive opinion on these issues,

in this chapter, I will leave the question of their relationship and the status of their male

and female bodies open. I do so in order to raise questions about celibacy, sexuality, and

love in premodern Japan, to open it out from the question of whether or not they loved

each other, to recognize that their desires for each other were not constructed in an


environment in which romantic love and its sexual consummation were primary to the

construction of individual identity, and to consider the desires Bunchi and Isshi had in

their lifetimes for particular kinds of bodies, for enlightenment, or for the kinds of

privilege that came with having a certain kind of body, whether male or imperial.

Considering desire and gender in this way will, moreover, serve as a counter to

two contemporary trends in scholarship on Buddhist clerics. The first is the tendency to

interpret sexuality and celibacy in contemporary terms, a topic that was explored briefly

in the previous chapter. The second is the resultant tendency to focus on clerical celibacy

and sexual activity to the exclusion of all else. If, as Halperin said, the contemporary

view of sexuality is that it is an expression of one's private, affective dispositions (love, in

other words) then to cut oneself off from that private expression of one’s innermost being

will seem to be the crux of the religious life, the greatest sacrifice one could make. This

contemporary focus on celibacy or the lack thereof in premodern Japanese clerical

practice reinforces the necessity of studying the precepts, because they are what are being

violated when a monk or nun has sex. This has driven attention to monks and away from

nuns, whose celibacy is not seen as problematic, and, moreover, has directed attention

away from their family lives and roles as husbands, sons, and fathers.

Approaches to Bunchi’s Relationship to Isshi

Suenaga Masao and Nishibori Ichizō, the authors of the 1955 work, Bunchi nyoō,

commissioned by the abbess of Enshōji, simply refused to speculate about Bunchi’s love

life.7 They reported her departure from her marriage and her relationship with Isshi



without extensive comment, choosing, evidently, to follow Chimyō, and Bunchi herself,

in seeing her as destined for a career as a nun from childhood. In his multi-volume work

on Japanese history, Nihon bunkashi, published in the 1950s, Tsuji Zennosuke discussed

Isshi’s relationship to Bunchi, but only alluded indirectly to the possibility that they may

have had romantic feelings for each other, choosing to focus instead on Isshi’s bad

feelings towards the shogunate.8 In a chapter on Bunchi in a 1977 book on Japanese

women, Yasuda Fukiko developed Bunchi’s and Isshi’s relationship into a full-blown

story of star-crossed lovers. She titled the subsections of her chapter accordingly. The

section on Bunchi’s childhood and marriage was headed “From Life in the Shadows to an

Unhappy Marriage”9 and the section on Bunchi’s relationship with Isshi was called

“Secret Love for Isshi.”10

The story that Yasuda told is the one that would be the most recognizable to a

contemporary audience. She portrayed Bunchi as neglected, compared to the children

Go-Mizunoo had with Tōfukumon’in,11 and speculated that, because Konoe Nobuhiro did

not record Bunchi’s marriage in his journal, there was something fishy about the

marriage.12 Yasuda adduced that there had been some complicated circumstance (fukai

jijō) that assailed Bunchi, which led to the end of the marriage.13 In the next section,

Yasuda explained what, or who, assailed Bunchi: Isshi, described here as an

8 Tsuji, Nihon bunkashi, 197.

9 Yasuda, “Bunchi ni,” 49.


11 Yasuda, “Bunchi ni,” 54-55.




exceptionally handsome man. Yasuda proposed that Bunchi had attended one of Isshi’s

dharma talks at court while she was still married, and went away with Isshi’s image

etched in her mind and heart.14 After describing Bunchi’s tonsure and the founding of

Enshōji, Yasuda returned to Bunchi’s feelings for Isshi, saying that “although she had

separated herself from the ties of the lay world, in her thoughts, she still burned with love

for Isshi.”15 Bunchi’s desire to have a male body, in Yasuda’s view, stemmed from this

love, although Yasuda left it unclear whether Bunchi’s change to a male body would

have eliminated her feelings of love for Isshi, or enabled her to act on them.

One of Isshi’s letters in response to Bunchi’s wish that she had a male body was

included in his Goroku. Isshi referred to construction at Enshōji in the body of the letter,

dating it to 1641 or 2, when Enshōji was still under construction. Isshi probably wrote it

while he was at his temple Hōjōji in Tanba province and I will refer to it as the Tanba

letter. The text of the letter in full is as follows:

On his way back, [Chimyō] Jōin stopped by to visit. He continues to excel in his practice. Happily, so do you, as you follow your karmic path. Are you keeping in mind truth and the idea of complete interpenetration? Are you devoting yourself to preserving your own mysterious light? Are you avoiding causing impurity? Are you, in encountering objects, avoiding giving birth to attachments to oppositions? Are you gradually dissolving the habits of past lives and the impurity accumulated through karma? Are you remembering to have a mind that reveres the teaching, relying on the three jewels? You were originally born in the most respected and most elite family in the realm, but you resisted being shut up in a cage of the luxury of the world. On the outside you keep the pure precepts and on the inside you polish your Buddha mind, practicing assiduously without a break. Your will transcends the will of a jōbu, and truly, through innumerable past lives, if you had not held on to the power of your vow, you would not have accomplished what you have in this life.I understand that you are upset because you were not born a man. If that is truly the case, then, happily, there is the expedient of transformation into a man and I


15 Yasuda, “Bunchi ni,” 64. The Japanese is “shikashi zokuen o hanareta to ittemo, Isshi e no omoi ni sono mi o koyashita koto mo atta.”


want you to enact that. The character of a woman is that, for innumerable kalpas, she is stuck in the glue of attachment and obsession, of anger and grudges, lies, greed, and mistakes. Usually, regardless of high or low, people who receive women’s bodies are like this. For this reason, practicing the path to enlightenment is exceedingly difficult, and after death the mind stuck in samsara is the heaviest. If one can repent and atone, and practice austerities, one can use up the karmic seeds in the storehouse consciousness and purify it. We call that the essence of achieving the body of a man. And could there only be changing to a man? If a person can change the impurity of the five skandhas they can transform into the dharma body of Vairocana where they are standing. For that reason, a monk of old said, “like when a snake changes to a dragon without having to change its scales, one does not change one’s appearance when one achieves buddhahood.” If you have faith in this explanation, and practice as if you were putting out a fire on the top of your head, every moment, or practice as deliberately as if you were stepping on thin ice, you will become unable to forget this. If you are only upset about your woman’s body, without knowing that you have to work at changing your woman’s mind, then it is like being angry at your drunk body, without throwing away your sake cup. I understand that, regarding the management of your new convent, that you will be moving your brocade mat on the fifth of next month. I am busy with the management of my own temple, so I cannot get there quickly, but I will send a lesser teacher, and have him extend my good wishes from far away. I beg that you widen and extend the gate of Buddhism, and do something about the light of wisdom. And if you create the wisdom of great happiness in your women, you will not just be illuminating this land, but, like Sakyamuni, will have many great disciples of the opposite sex.16

Yasuda concluded that this letter both turned the respect Bunchi had for Isshi into love,

and enabled her to lose herself in thoughts of Isshi, both as a teacher and as a man.17

Tsuji did not consider this letter as something that would have inspired Bunchi to feel

love for Isshi. According to Tsuji, Isshi felt bad for Bunchi and was explaining the

technology of changing to a man to console her. In doing so, his respect for her edged

over into care for her, intensifying his negative feelings towards the shogunate.18 I will

16 Isshi Goroku, 94-96.




return to the content of this letter in the next section, but for now, I will move to the

second letter Isshi wrote to Bunchi that Yasuda used as evidence of their mutual love.

Yasuda led up to her discussion of the second letter by attributing part of Isshi’s

love for Bunchi to his sympathy with her for being the object of the shogunate’s

resentment. The fact that Bunchi was the daughter of Go-Mizunoo, a man Isshi respected

greatly, according to Yasuda, also increased Isshi’s love for her. This letter, composed

in 1644, after Isshi had moved to Omi province to revive the Rinzai monastic complex,

Eigenji, was preserved in the collection of the Kyoto lawyer Moriya Kōzō (1876 - 1953),

which was subsequently given to the Kyoto National Museum. I will refer to this letter

as the Omi letter. Tsuji Zennosuke also cited this letter in Nihon bunkashi, and, since he

and Yasuda cited different portions of the letter, I will use both sources to piece together

a longer excerpt. The first part comes from Tsuji’s work. He set the scene by explaining

that Isshi had visited Bunchi in Kyoto and, once he returned to Eigenji, Bunchi wrote to

him. Tsuji did not quote the letter directly at length, but interspersed direct quotes with

summary. I will quote Tsuji’s text, including his summary. His version of the beginning

of the letter is as follows:

Isshi said that because she he not stay as long as promised, Bunchi was left with regrets that they did not have time to talk as much as she would have liked. “Because it is this way, even if we are separated by one thousand or even ten thousand ri,19 we still have one mind because of unimpeded self-existence. If we correspond together, our bodies, which are leather bags, five feet long, will have nothing to be upset about, whether they are near or far to each other.” In response to Bunchi’s proposal that she come to Eigenji and build a residence near Isshi, Isshi reminded her that that would not be appropriate in the current climate of the world, especially because of her high status, so she should give up the idea for now. Isshi recommended that, after some time has passed, Bunchi should build a retreat near Eigenji so she could practice with Isshi and his students [Chimyō]

19 The ri is a measure of distance equivalent to about four kilometers or two and a half miles.


Jōin and Ryōgi, and together they would hope that Bunchi mastered the expedient of changing into a man. It would probably be good, Isshi said, for Bunchi to wait fourteen or fifteen years, especially since she should be near to the retired sovereign to carry out her filial obligations to him. Isshi reminded her that in this world that is like a dream, she should not follow her momentary inclinations and promised her that in the future they would practice together and achieve the Buddha way without a doubt.20

Tsuji went on to quote and summarize more of the letter, and the section immediately

following the above quote is the same in both Tsuji and Yasuda. Tsuji quoted the rest of

the letter indirectly, while Yasuda quoted it directly, so my translation follows Yasuda’s

quote. The section they cited in common is as follows:

I think your devotion to Shotoku Taishi is truly admirable. I hear that you made your first visit to Tennōji and I suppose that you prayed that the flame of our dharma lineage would burn forever, and that I would have a long life. Truly, it is hard to express the whole of my gratitude. In any case, because you realize that we have two bodies, there is nothing left to say. Because it is this way, if we have to have two different bodies, you wish that they could both be male. Also, these days what is it coming to? I would like to see you and talk to you a little. If only we were not hindered by the circumstances of the world, night and day, for ten or twelve days, I would like to talk with you as our thoughts arise, of the way of the world and of the dharma, in a quiet place, just the two of us before the Buddha. The world will certainly not let this wish be fulfilled, so we just have to wait until we are old. People ordinarily dread the advent of old age, but I suppose you and I, because of our connection will have to lament the fact that old age is coming too slowly.21

It is telling that Yasuda omitted the section of the letter that Tsuji summarized. She

highlighted Bunchi’s desire for a male body, Isshi’s desire to talk to Bunchi alone, and

the ways of the world that made this impossible. Isshi’s recommendation that she keep

working to transform into a man, and his deprecation of the body as a five-foot-long

leather bag did not fit her narrative of love.

20 Tsuji, Nihon bunkashi, 198. Ryōgi was another student of Isshi’s.



Yasuda wanted to see Isshi and Bunchi as star-crossed lovers, torn between their

vows of celibacy and their feelings for each other. Tsuji evidently did not want to see

their relationship as a love affair, but he did portray Isshi and Bunchi as kindred spirits,

particularly in their anti-shogunal sentiments, and his comments on the letter Isshi wrote

from Eigenji did hint at a romantic attachment. As the author of a book about Bunchi, I

cannot exempt myself from a similar examination of my desires for Bunchi. When I first

read Yasuda’s work, I recoiled at the suggestion that Isshi and Bunchi were in love. I

wanted Bunchi to be “beyond” love and desire. I wanted her to be fully committed to

being a celibate nun, and I wanted Isshi’s feelings for her to be “purely” those of a caring

mentor and teacher. I even wanted her to be relieved at having left her marriage. These

desires originated in two sources. Firstly, as someone who has resisted putting her

romantic relationships before her career, I have seen my dedication to scholarship as

analogous to Bunchi’s dedication to Buddhism (without the 4 A.M. wake-up time) and I

wanted to continue to envision Bunchi as similar to me. Secondly, I made a division

between pure and impure feelings and relationships, similar to the one between pure and

impure motives for taking the tonsure discussed in the previous chapter. If Bunchi

became interested in Buddhism because Isshi was handsome, or if she were troubled in

the early days of her life as a nun by sexual desire for Isshi or romantic longing for him,

that seemed to me to cheapen her. I judged the romance narrative cheap because I was

caught in the dichotomy between “cheap” and “valuable,” or, in other words, “this

worldly” and “otherworldly.” Because this is the very dichotomy I wish to undermine,

and whose construction I want to examine, I have to ask different questions of the

material. We can never know whether Bunchi and Isshi were in love or felt sexual desire


for each other, unless some truly startling new material comes to light. I will not rule out

those possibilities, however, as much as they go against my inclinations. I will, however,

remind the readers again that to say they were “in love” or to think of their sexual desire

as identical to ours is to project contemporary notions of love, desire, and sex onto a

society that did not share those notions.

Moreover, one of the other problems with Yasuda’s romance narrative was that it

assumed that both Isshi and Bunchi felt desire for members of the opposite sex. Just as it

is anachronistic to consider different-sex relationships in premodern Japan as identical in

quality to modern ones, it is similarly anachronistic to assume that same-sex

relationships, of sex or love, were identical to modern homosexual relationships, a central

point of Halperin’s work.22 Scholars like Gregory Pflugfelder and Gary Leupp have

demonstrated that male-male sex and desire were common in early modern Japan. In this

case, too, rather than a matter of personal identity, sex was an expression of one’s status;

men would have sex with other men in some circumstances, such as a military or

monastic community, in which sexual relations were structured according to seniority and

authority. Young men would become the sexual partners of older men, of higher rank or

status, as the ones penetrated. In their turn, once these young men achieved sufficient age

and status, they would have sexual relations with young men, this time as the ones doing

the penetrating.23 Walthall’s research on women in all-female communities like that of

the shogunal women’s quarters demonstrated that women were imagined by men to

22 Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, 24-5.

23 Gregory M. Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600-1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 29-44; Gary Leupp, Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 109-122.


engage in sex with each other, so, although male fantasies cannot serve as historical

evidence for women’s practices, the possibility of women engaging in sex with each

other was acknowledged during Bunchi’s lifetime.24 There is no evidence I have yet

found that states anything explicitly about the quality of Bunchi’s or Isshi’s sexual

desires or acts. Like their feelings for each other, their sex lives will have to remain an

open question for the present. But, the possibility that they did not feel sexual desire for

each other is as important to an understanding of their relationship as the possibility that

they did. It widens our field of vision, enabling us to see more than a heterosexual

romance, requited or unrequited, consummated or unconsummated.

Transformation into a Man

Gender and desire in these letters hinged on the distinctive quality of male bodies.

Bunchi wanted a male body, and Isshi recommended in both letters that she accomplish

this desire by transforming into a man. The idea of transformation into a man was

usually associated with becoming a Buddha, and was expressed in the phrase henjō

nanshi in Japanese. The Lotus Sutra, a text Bunchi was particularly devoted to,

contained one of the classic expressions of this technology. Its twelfth chapter, entitled

“Devadatta,” told the story of the nāga princess. In this episode, the bodhisattva

Mañjuśrī (Jp. Monju) recounted of his time in the underwater realm of the nāgas, or

dragons, and singled out the daughter of the nāga king as one who could achieve

enlightenment in an instant.25 When the bodhisattva Jñānākara (Jp. Chishaku) doubted

24 Walthall, “Masturbation,” 1.

25 Burton Watson, tr., The Lotus Sutra (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 187.


her ability, the dragon princess herself appeared before the crowd, praised the Buddha,

and asserted that she had attained bodhi, or enlightenment. The arhat Śāriputra, foremost

in wisdom in the early Buddhist tradition, cast further doubt on the dragon princess’

abilities, and cited the five obstacles to support his case. In response, the dragon girl

handed the Buddha a jewel and proceeded to transform instantly into a male Buddha and

preach the dharma.26

There were a number of ambiguities in this story that mirrored some of the

ambiguities in Isshi’s advice to Bunchi and his expression of his own desires. Firstly,

there is the question of the relationship of the female body to the female mind. In the

story of the dragon princess, she asserted that she had achieved enlightenment, or bodhi,

yet she was not described as a buddha until she transformed her body. Similarly, when,

in the Tanba letter, Isshi advised Bunchi to work on transforming into a man, he raised

the question of the difference between the body and the mind. He began by explaining

that she received her female body due to past karma, writing that women were “stuck in

the glue of attachment and obsession, of anger and grudges, lies, greed, and mistakes,”

making it hard for them to progress on the path, and leading to further rebirths as a

woman.27 The character of women, as attached, angry, and greedy, fed a vicious cycle in

which these character traits generated bodies, and the bodies prevented the women who

received these bodies from changing their character traits.

26 These were that a woman could not become a Brahma, a Śakra, a cakravartin, or wheel-turning king, a Mara, or a Buddha. The portrayal of Śāriputra as a figure of ridicule was due to the polemical nature of the Lotus Sutra as a Mahayana text. Watson, Lotus Sutra, 188. See also Sakamoto Yukio and Iwamoto Yutaka, ed. Hokkekyō, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1976), 224.



In spite of this assertion of difference between body and character, Isshi

undermined distinctions between the physical and the non-physical aspects of being

female elsewhere in the letter. He recommended that Bunchi practice repentance and

austerities in order to exhaust and purify the karmic seeds that accumulated in the

storehouse consciousness (Skt. ālaya vijñāna). These seeds were the residue of past

actions and ordinarily came to fruition naturally through one’s present actions in the

world but Buddhist practices could force these seeds to sprout without the practitioner

feeling the effects, or could purify the seeds so that they ripened harmlessly. Isshi

identified this kind of practice as a way to change one’s mind, and it was in this section

that he simultaneously undermined the distinction between body and mind and affirmed

it. Isshi said that purifying your karmic seeds was the “essence of achieving the body of

a man,” fundamentally affirming the non-dualism of the mind (storehouse

consciousness), action (karmic seeds), and the body (of a man in this case).28 He then

identified this transformation into someone with a male body with purifying the five

skandhas, the ever-changing bundles of qualities that make up a person, whether male or

female. Isshi continued the series of identifications, saying that one who can do this can

also transform him-, her- or itself into the dharma body of Vairocana Buddha. In other

words, achieving the body of a man is tantamount to achieving Buddhahood, the state of

being in which, like Kannon, or the dragon princess, one could transform from male, to

female, to nāga, and back again in the blink of an eye.

For Isshi, however, retaining one’s female body was also the essence of

transformation into a man qua transforming into a Buddha. He compared changing from



an ordinary person to a Buddha to a snake changing to a dragon; when this happened,

there was no need for a change in the outward form of the snake. Isshi seems to have

moved from a consideration of seemingly different phenomena such as physical bodies,

actions, and minds as non-dual to a consideration of the body as fundamentally different

from the mind and therefore not in need of being changed.

Because Bunchi’s side of the correspondence is not extant, it is hard to get a full

sense of why she wanted a male body. In the Omi letter, Isshi cited Bunchi as saying that

if they had to have two bodies, she wished that they could both be male.29 She might

have wanted to unite with Isshi in a romantic, or sexual, way, but she might also have

wanted to be Isshi, to merge with him in such a way that she could practice as he

practiced, as a man and as part of the wider Rinzai community of their time. As a nun,

Bunchi could never be a full part of that community, but would always have been

exceptional; the one nun in a hall full of monks. Moreover, Bunchi’s female body

disqualified her from practicing at Hōjōji or Eigenji with Isshi, Chimyō, and Ryogi, the

other student Isshi mentioned in the Omi letter, despite its transformation into a clerical

body. Whether or not Bunchi loved Isshi, she wanted to express that love not through

being a devout lay woman, or being the abbess of Enshōji, but through being a member

of Isshi’s group of students.

It does not seem probably that Bunchi wished for a male body because she felt

sexual desire for women; Bunchi’s desire for a male body was strongly correlated to her

desire to be with Isshi specifically and does not seem to have been a source of distress for

her in other ways. Similarly, Isshi did not see Bunchi’s female body as a problem in and



of itself, and he downplayed the importance of her female body in his writing on their

relationship. For example, he wrote in the Omi letter that if he and Bunchi exchanged

letters, that would suffice to manifest their one mind in the conventional realm and then

their bodies, those leather bags, would have nothing to be upset about.30 This statement

opens another series of questions about the status of bodies and their desires: Was

Bunchi’s body upset because it could not live at a monastery? Would it have been upset

not to have physical or sexual contact with Isshi? Would Isshi’s body have been upset

not to have had the chance to sit near Bunchi or to have had physical or sexual contact

with her? It is impossible to say, but it is clear that there was some kind of physical

desire, for proximity on Isshi’s part, or identity on Bunchi’s part, if not for sexual contact.

It is also clear that Isshi did not want to dwell on that, but wanted to focus on the aspect

of their relationship that could be satisfied by an exchange of letters. It might also have

been less important to Isshi to remember their physical interrelation, because he yearned

for mental or affective, relations with Bunchi and not physical ones, but it is hard to say

for sure.

The Body: Male, Female, and Clerical

Isshi might have deemphasized transforming the body because he had a negative

attitude towards the human body, male or female. In the Omi letter, Isshi described the

body as a leather bag, five feet in length. This attitude was part of the Buddhist tradition

of using body-negative language and visualizing horrific images of the body in

meditation in order to cut off attachments to one’s own body, particularly as the locus of

30 Yasuda, “Bunchi ni,” 69; Tsuji, Nihon bunkashi, 198.


the illusory self, as well as to reduce sexual desire for the bodies of others.31 Isshi

described the body in this way because he was trying to console Bunchi, and himself.

They could not live together as master and disciple, as Isshi was able to do with his male

students. In the Tanba letter, written first, Isshi did not mention his own desires, but in

the subsequent Omi letter, he acknowledged that the fact of their different bodies was

distressing to him as well. He wanted to spend time talking to Bunchi, just the two of

them before the Buddha.32 The compensation, for Isshi, was that, as he wrote to Bunchi,

“even if we are separated by one thousand or even ten thousand ri, we still have one mind

because of unimpeded self-existence.”33 Unimpeded self-existence, or unobstructed

freedom, is the idea that all phenomena mutually interpenetrate without hindrance, when

viewed from the perspective of ultimate reality. By extension, Bunchi’s and Isshi’s

minds were part of the same matrix of infinite interpenetration, and the experience of

separation was merely an effect of conventional reality. Like Isshi’s recommendation to

Bunchi that she work on purifying her karmic seeds to effect the transformation into a

male, this passage identified the mind as the site of the transformation of delusion into

enlightenment, and, as such, Isshi saw it as more important than the body. From the

perspective of ultimate reality, Bunchi’s and Isshi’s physical bodies were subject to the

same infinite interpenetration as their minds, and, indeed, it would have been impossible

to separate out their minds from their bodies in ultimate reality.

31 See Liz Wilson, Charming Cadavers: Horrific Figurations of the Feminine in Indian Hagiographic Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) for a discussion of this phenomenon in Indian Buddhist texts.

32 Yasuda, “Bunchi ni,” 69; Tsuji, 199.



Yet, Isshi also identified the body of a renunciant as the place where

transformation could, and must, take place. In an undated letter addressed to the entire

community of nuns at Enshōji, Isshi wrote,

Do not wish for adornments and you will be avoiding sin in a further life. This [the form of a monastic practitioner] is the best practice for that. This was the reasoning of the Buddha when he recommended that first people should shave their heads, than take on the body of a renunciant and wish for the road to enlightenment. In addition, this develops the mind with the compassion like that of parents for their child. But there are some people who are mistaken and start to do things that are not in accord with the Buddha’s way, such as not to shave the hair that is attractive to people, and not to ignore the sexual desires of the body. They do not make their form difficult to look at; this is the greatest foolishness and utmost mistake on the path. If you do this, you will be born in the animal or hungry ghost realm. Please think hard about this matter. It will be like rain falling in empty space, no end to it.34

In Isshi’s view, a person took on the body of a renunciant upon ordination. This was still

a sexed body, given the emphasis Isshi placed on Bunchi’s physical difference from

himself and the other monks at his monasteries, but it was different from a lay body. As

such, it needed to be disciplined according to the monastic precepts, such as the

injunctions to shave one’s head and refrain from adorning oneself.

One of the benefits of this restraint was that it rendered the body unattractive to

those who looked at it. In his letter, Isshi described hair as “attractive to people,” and

asserted that not to make the body difficult to look at -- by others -- was a serious

mistake. Isshi implicitly acknowledged the attractiveness of the female body, albeit not

necessarily to him, even when it was clothed in monastic robes. In this passage, the

desires of the nuns and the desires of those who saw the nuns were interrelated. The nuns

34 Suenaga and Nishibori, Bunchi nyoō, 251. Suenaga does not give a date for this text, but it had to have been written between 1641, the year of Enshōji’s founding, and 1646, the year of Isshi’s death.


were not to incite the desires of others and were, simultaneously to ignore their own

desires. Monastic form was not intended to serve as an enticement to the fulfillment of

sexual desire; it was intended, for Isshi, to be the expression of a desire for enlightenment

and the means by which one could cut off, or ignore, one’s own desires.

Isshi placed great importance on the differences of the body, despite downplaying

its importance in relation to the mind. In his letters cited above, he distinguished between

lay and clerical bodies, and male and female ones, while acknowledging the ultimate

identity of all these various bodies with the mind, and indeed with each other all of

reality. Isshi’s emphasis on the necessity of disciplining the body seems to have sprung

from a negative view of bodies as the nexus of desires, one’s own and those of others.

Similarly, the body was always subject to being seen, by oneself and by others, and had

to visible in a way that not only did not incite desire, but demonstrated to the world that

one had cut off one’s own desires. Yet, Isshi also recognized that the body was the

primary means through which enlightenment could be achieved. The body was the main

object of the monastic regulations that Isshi so valued. This was not only because it was

a potential source of distraction from one’s goals, but because it was, as Isshi well knew,

subject to the same logic of nondualism that pervades Mahayana Buddhism.

Consequently, the body, just as much as the mind, was the vehicle of enlightenment, the

site through which one’s enlightenment could be accomplished. The regulations that

governed the lives, and bodies, of monks and nuns were not simply negative restraints but

positive channels through which one’s Buddha nature could be expressed.

It seems clear that Isshi wished that Bunchi could be a member of his community.

In addition to regretting that they could not spend as much time alone talking as he would


have liked, in the Omi letter, Isshi told Bunchi, “when some time has passed, build a

retreat near her so you can practice with me and Jōin and Ryōgi and together we will

hope that you achieve the expedient of changing into a man.”35 Here, Isshi welcomed her

into his community, with the proviso that she reside in a separate establishment and that

she keep working on attaining a man’s body/mind. He proposed fourteen or fifteen years

as enough time for her to wait to move near him. Later in this letter, Isshi, having

lamented that the world would not let him act on his wish to stay alone with Bunchi,

wrote that while ordinary people dread the coming of old age, for himself and Bunchi,

old age could not come soon enough.

The importance Isshi placed on the passage of time offers another possibility for

thinking about transformation into a man. In terms of her own progress on the Buddhist

path, Bunchi’s female body was much less of a problem than her female mind, in Isshi’s

view. The problem with her having a female body came in the fact that it was, despite

her status as a nun, an inescapably sexed, and sexual, body. Bunchi’s transformation into

a nun, and the bodily changes that accompanied her change in status, were not enough to

desex her. Despite her shaved head, her robes, her diet, her way of walking, sleeping,

eating, and sitting, all of which changed when she took the tonsure, and even despite her

vow of celibacy, Bunchi’s body was sexually threatening, if not to Isshi, than to the world

that would not accept Isshi’s and Bunchi’s living together. It was time that would change

Bunchi’s female body. Old age signaled a change in sexuality and sexual desirability, not

least because of the changes that came with menopause. When she got old, Bunchi

would still have a female body, but it would have changed into a different body, one that



carried with it different meanings and associations. Moreover, time would change Isshi’s

body, and the bodies of his other students, Chimyō and Ryōgi, to ones that experienced

sexual desire less intensely. Furthermore, the change of age would affect Bunchi’s mind,

and her desires as well. If she were to practice transformation into a man diligently,

Bunchi had the hope of achieving enlightenment at some point in the future, perhaps as

an old woman. As an old woman, she might have let go of her desire to change into a

man, and even her desire to live with Isshi.

Isshi and Bunchi did not get the time they needed to change into old people

together. Isshi died in 1646, when he was thirty-eight and Bunchi was twenty-seven.

Bunchi herself died in 1697, fifty-one years after Isshi, when she was seventy-eight years

old. During that time, Bunchi worked to transform herself into a man through her

disciplined, reclusive practice at Enshōji. She never grew as close to another male Zen

monk as she had been to Isshi, although she maintained a close relationship with Chimyō,

but she grew close to other nuns at Enshōji and seems not to have let the loss affect her

dedication to the Buddhist path.

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