ABSTRACT
Building on the achievements of the recent scholarship on the representations and conceptualizations of motherhood inside the monastic community (Ohnuma, Meeks, Glassman), this chapter explores the hitherto-overlooked body of secret works produced by Japanese Sōtō Zen monks during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This textual body, mainly composed of secret documents and ritual manuals, represents the ideal intellectual arena in which to tackle how mothers’ presence influenced and shaped the monastic understanding of the female gestational body. In the case of Zen temples, the tangible existence of mothers inside the cloister walls manifested through their bodies and spirits, which are the central theme of several ritual practices directed to save women from their cruel infernal fate. Indeed, although producing offspring retained a high social value, in premodern Japan, the contact with the pollution of parturition blood represented the primary cause of damnation for women. Therefore, the depiction of motherhood swung between the opposite poles of merit and infernal rebirth. This chapter investigates the array of ceremonies and ritual techniques articulated by Sōtō Zen monks to explore the duplicitous ontology of mothers’ flesh and locate these ritual practices within the broader cultural and historical products about motherhood produced in premodern Japan.
