Ecclesiastical discrimination against Zen Buddhist nuns during the Tokugawa period (1603-1868) is well known. Soto Zen nuns could not become Zen teachers or Zen masters. They could not ordain their own female disciples. They could not reside inside temple compounds, even if no monks were present. They could not lead important religious ceremonies such as funerals (soshiki), a restriction which deprived them of an important source of income. Regardless of their seniority they always wore the black robes of a novice. Nuns ranked so low in the rigid social hierarchy of that time that their very existence went almost unnoticed by Tokugawa-period historians. Tokugawa-period compilations of Soto hagiographies (soden), for example, describe the lives of more than one thousand eminent monks, but mention the names of fewer than thirty nuns.

        It would be a mistake, however, to conclude from the Tokugawa-period evidence that women played no significant roles in medieval Soto Zen or that Soto nuns always had been confined to positions of low status. In fact, just the opposite was trues. Zen Buddhism grew and flourished in medieval Japan (ca. 1221-1600) in no small measure because of the exceptional support it received from women and nuns. From the time of Lady Tachibana Kachiko (wife of Saga tenno, 786-842) -- who supposedly founded Danrinji (ca. 824) as the earliest Zen temple in Japanese history -- women repeatedly sponsored and abetted the construction of new Zen Temples. Early Soto monastic centers, such as Koshoji (near Kyoto), Daijiji (in Kyushu), Yokoji (in Kaga), and Sojiji (in Noto), were founded through donations provided by female patrons. Moreover, early Soto attracted nuns in large numbers. Some documents suggest that nuns might have equaled or even outnumbered the monks. It should not be surprising, therefore, that sometimes female patrons became nuns and abbesses at the temples they helped establish.

        Dogen (1200-1253), the founding ancestor of the Japanese Soto lineage, addressed lectures to his female disciples and not only asserted that women can attain religious awakening but also that it makes no difference if one's Buddhist teacher is a man or a woman. Dogen's words became reality during the fourteenth century when Keizan Jokin (1264-1325) and his immediate disciples each certified a number of women as Zen masters, fully authorized to administer ordinations and to lead monastic funerals and other ceremonies. Several of these females Zen masters controlled their own convents (niji) and founded their own lineages within the Soto order.

        In medieval Soto Zen examples of male patrons establishing temples, entering the religious life, and becoming an abbott are almost completely unknown. This contrast suggests that medieval men and women became monastic patrons because of very different motives. In the case of the male patrons for whom we have documentation their involvement in Buddhist temples seems primarily to have furthered their political and economic goals. In the case of female patrons, however, involvement in temple life seems to have simultaneous subverted and reinforced their social roles a daughters, wives, sisters, and mothers.

        The early Soto convents, however, disappeared. The female Zen lineages died out. The Soto order never developed a permanent network of convents along the lines of the Five Mountain convents (nijigozan) of Kyoto and Kamakura. Records of medieval Soto funeral sermons reveal that female patrons continued to outnumber male patrons throughout the medieval period. Over the course of time, however, the ratio of monks to nuns changed radically as fewer and fewer women entered Soto monastic orders. By the end of the medieval period the vast majority of funeral sermons were delivered on behalf of lay women, not nuns. The religious liberation promised by earlier Soto teachers was no longer to be realized in this life, but in the next.

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