Handbook of Women in Japanese Buddhism

This handbook explores Buddhist women’s lives and agency from ancient times to the present in Japan.

The book examines lives and representations of Buddhist women by utilizing a thematic approach, with each theme representing a network of interrelated gender roles, norms, and hierarchies that determine the conditions under which women “lived” and “live” Buddhism. The contributions highlight what it meant and means to be Buddhist and a woman in the context of gendered power-structures as expressed in the realms of spatial organization, medicine and healthcare, music and sound, embodied gender and sexuality, and visual and material culture.

Exploring a topic which has previously been under-represented in scholarship, this will be a valuable resource to students and scholars of religious, Japanese, and gender studies.

Monika Schrimpf is Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Tübingen, Germany. Her research interests are in the field of modern and contemporary Buddhism in Japan, with a particular interest in gendered Buddhism and the entanglement of medicine and religion in contemporary Japan.

Emily B. Simpson is currently Assistant Professor in the Department for the Study of Religions at Wake Forest University, USA. Her areas of interest include the conceptualization of Shinto and Buddhist deities as well as the construction of womanhood and gender in religious narratives, especially origin stories.