Jizo and Pregnancy
A temple to Jizo was built in 851 by Fujiwara no Akiko, the consort of Emperor Montoku, after prayers to Jizo ended her long and difficult pregnancy. After giving birth to a son who became the first boy emperor of Japan, she erected a Jizo temple in Nara called Obitoki-dera or “Temple for Loosening the Girdle” (granting easy birth). The press of pilgrims visiting this temple was described as like the crowds on a busy market day. Thousands of easy births have been ascribed to this Jizo.
There are many Jizos in Japan dedicated to the particular concerns of women. There are Jizos that assist women with birth, the Belly Band Jizo (Hara-obi no Jizo) and the Easy Birth Jizo (Koyasu Jizo). An eighteenth-century Jizo specialized in curing women with nipple problems. There are also Prosperous Birth Jizos (Tai-san Jizo), Child Granting Jizos (Ko-sazuke Jizo), and Child Rearing Jizos (Ko-sodate Jizo) usually shown with a child on their laps. Pregnant women still apply sand to their bodies from a Jizo temple in Mibu to be assured of an easy birth. After the birth they return the sand to the temple.
There is a custom in Izumo province in which young people carry a stone Jizo to the gate of the house of newly married couple on the bridal night. In Iwami province several stones are carried to the bridegroom’s home. According to modern explanations the images help remind the woman to be firm like stone in her fidelity and to have the love and compassion of Jizo. Also it is hoped that the union will be as hard to turn over as the stone Jizos, and divorce will not occur. These customs are probably remnants of ancient rites involving stone phallic images. It is likely that they were begun to ensure fertility and easy births.
The association between Jizo and pregnancy is implied in the Japanese Jizo statues that are fashioned with small Jizo images hidden within them, much like a baby in the womb. These are called haragomori (hidden in the belly) images. The term for fetus is haragomori no ko. A story from the 1600s tells of a small Jizo made of aloe wood that was kept by a courtesan on her body. One night a Buddhist priest heard the mysterious crying of a child. He found it was the little Jizo weeping for the immoral company it was forced to keep. The priest retrieved the image and placed it inside a bigger Jizo statue in Nembutsudo in Nara. It is known as the “Jizo who wept at night.”
I wonder. Are there unborn children whose tears add salt to the amniotic sea they float in, weeping in the dark for the suffering humans who will soon become their guardians or tormenters? Who will rescue them? Who will help them return to their place of ease within the large and sacred body?
Another standing Jizo attributed to the twelfth-century sculptor Unkei had a small copper Jizo enclosed in its belly. The small Jizo was said to have emerged from a pool. There are many stories in Japan of Jizo images found floating in rivers, drifting ashore on beaches, or being dug out of the earth where they were hidden for centuries. Often the image was found because it was radiating light. In these stories Jizo miraculously materializes in the water like a fetus (called a “water baby” in Japan) or emerges like a baby from the womb of the earth.
The Buddha as Protector of Women
Why would women need extra protection from Jizo Bodhisattva or anyone? In the time of the Buddha, the special needs of women were so obvious that the Buddha was reluctant to allow women to be ordained until his disciple Ananda intervened on their behalf. This is the story from the Pali canon, a historical record of the Buddha’s life and teaching:
Mahapajapati was the Buddha’s aunt and a second wife to the Buddha’s father Suddodhana, who was a ruler of the warrior clan called the Sakyans. The future Buddha’s mother had died after giving birth to him and Mahapajapati, another of his father’s wives, nursed and raised him. After the Buddha became enlightened he returned to his birthplace to teach and both his father and stepmother became his followers. Several years later when Suddhodhana died, his widow Mahapajapati became determined to become ordained although the Buddha had ordained only men. She went to her foster son, the Buddha, paid homage, and requested that women be allowed to be ordained. The Buddha told her, “Enough, do not ask for the going forth from the house life into homelessness for women.” Twice more Mahapajapati asked him and twice more he refused her. She departed in tears.
Mahapajapati continued to follow the Buddha’s teaching and became a lay teacher for many women who had been cast into uncertainty and personal suffering. These included women who had belonged to the future Buddha’s harem before he left the palace on his spiritual pilgrimage and women whose husbands died in local wars.
Seeing first hand the benefit of the Buddha’s teaching Mahapajapati renewed her determination to become ordained. She cut off her hair and put on a saffron robe. She and a number of her women followers walked 150 miles barefoot to speak with the Buddha again. She stood outside the hall where he taught, her feet swollen, her body covered with dust, her face wet with tears. The Venerable Ananda saw her in this pitiful condition, and inquiring, learned of her sincere desire to enter the homeless life. He went to the Buddha and asked on behalf of the women that they might become ordained. The Buddha again refused. After asking and being refused three times Ananda realized he would have to use the truth that he had learned from the Buddha himself.
He asked, “Lord, are women capable, after going forth from the house life into homelessness in the Dharma and Discipline you have taught, of realizing the fruit of practice, and becoming fully awakened?” The Buddha replied, “They are.” Ananda then asked the Buddha not to deny the wonderful fruits of practice to the woman who had nursed the Buddha with her own breasts when his mother had died. The Buddha was won over by his own truth and agreed that women could join the sangha of the ordained.
Ananda is venerated by Buddhist women because of his advocacy for the spiritual potential and integrity of women.
Why would the Buddha be reluctant to ordain women? Why would women need extra protection? At the time of the Buddha, health and safety problems existed that were particular to women. Rape was common and women were not safe walking alone or even in small groups. When there was no birth control, women could be continually pregnant and caring for numbers of children from the age of fifteen on. Each pregnancy meant not only pain but a high risk of dying in childbirth, as the Buddha’s mother did, despite the extra care and nutrition afforded a queen. Women lost blood with menses and childbirth and without adequate iron in the diet could be chronically anemic, weak, and prey to infection. Average life expectancy was about thirty-five years. The care and feeding of many children meant a life of unending labor and also terror if her husband and in-laws were cruel. Women who did not bring a good bride price or bear a son could be cast out or killed.
These problems are not two millennia distant. When I lived in Korea in the early 1960s after the Korean War, the orphanages were filled with infant girls collected each morning from the trash heaps. Girls were a liability; they would cost their families a dowry. When even well- and Western-educated Asians found that my father had three daughters, they would shake their heads in pity, saying, “Well, maybe next time.” In the 1970s I taught in Africa. Half of infants died there before age five. In some cultures babies were not named before age one because the chance of survival was so low. To know that half their children would die must have caused women constant anxiety and suffering. Even as we entered the new millennium, we heard news reports about women who had been raped during the war in Serbo-Croatia. Their families told reporters it would have been better if the women had not survived the rape, because of the shame they brought upon the families. Some of these girls, as young as twelve or thirteen, have been cast out of their homes and reporters say they will not survive.
Buddhism as a Refuge for Women
A prevailing belief at the time of the Buddha was that a woman’s spiritual role was to bear sons, preferable ten in number. She could not become enlightened until she was reborn as a man. Her access to the divine was through men: her father, her husband, her sons. The Buddha gave spiritual protection to women by allowin
g no distinction based upon sex or caste. He accepted women as full members of the sangha whether they remained in lay life or underwent ordination, whether they had been queens, prostitutes, or victims of rape. The poems of the early Buddhist nuns in India tell of the hardships endured by women and the freedom, consolation, and safe refuge they found as followers of the Enlightened One.
Some of these were women who had gone mad with grief over losing a child or after being put out of their homes for failure to bear a son. One was Vasatthi, who went crazy and roamed, homeless, mourning for her dead son until she met the Buddha. Then she entered the enlightened state, an entirely different kind of homelessness. This is her poem:
Grief-stricken for my son,
mad-minded, out of my senses,
I was naked with wild hair
and I wandered anywhere.
I lived on trash heaps,
in a graveyard,
and by the highways.
Three years’ wandering,
starved and thirsty.
Then in the city of Mithila
I saw the one who tames
what is untamed
and goes his way in happiness,
enlightened, unafraid.
I came to my senses,
paid homage
and sat down.
Out of compassion
Gautama taught me the way.
When I heard his words
I set out into homelessness.
By putting his teachings into practice,
I realized great joy.
My grief is cut out,
finished, ended,
for I have understood the ground
from which all grief comes.
Chinese women also took refuge in ordination when it was introduced into China. Buddhist convents became places of asylum for women escaping cruelty in marriage and the dangers of war or homelessness. This occurred despite the rule that a Chinese woman who wished to be ordained was supposed to have the permission of the man who had authority over her—her father, her husband, or her son. In the fifth century, a thirteen-year old girl named Radiance of the Dharma, determined to enter a convent, vowed to immolate herself if her parents forced her to marry. Her teacher raised money by begging to pay off her betrothal fee. She became a skilled Dharma teacher who could not be defeated by the questions of famous masters, and built a temple and three convents before dying at age eighty-three.
Three girls played a pivotal role in the introduction of Buddhism into Japan by becoming the first ordained Buddhists in the country. An envoy to Korea had returned in 577 c.e. with Buddhist sutras, a sculptor of Buddhist images, a temple architect, a nun, and masters of the precepts, meditation techniques, and mantras. In 584 a Korean master ordained the eleven-year-old daughter of a Japanese government official and gave her the name Zenshin. Two of her companions also became nuns and a temple was built so offering could be made to them.
Several months later a severe smallpox epidemic broke out and many died. Advisors to Emperor Bidatsu convinced him that the cause was his support of the foreign religion. As a result the nuns’ temple was destroyed and the charred remains of a new Buddha statue thrown in the canal. Government officials arrested the young nuns, stripped them of their robes, and had them publicly whipped. When smallpox erupted again, people said it was in retribution for the burning of the Buddha image, and the temple was rebuilt. A few years later the nuns went to Korea to study and receive the full precepts. Upon their return many others entered the Buddhist order. Within thirty years there were a total of 816 monks and 569 nuns. Even if these three girls were ordained for political reasons, the new religion must have affected them deeply, giving them courage to face public humiliation and remain steadfast in the face of turning tides of public superstition.
Buddhism and Harassment
The Buddha protected the spiritual potential of women, and of men, by forbidding sexual harassment. These are examples from the Pali canon:
Once a monk saw a woman who was wearing a rough blanket and said, “Sister, is that thick, short hair yours?” Being naive she did not understand and said, “Yes, master, it is a rough blanket.”
At one time a monk was infatuated with a woman and said, “You are a faithful follower but you do not give the highest gift.” “What is the highest gift, sir?” she asked. “Sexual intercourse,” he answered.
In each case the monk was remorseful and went to the Buddha to report what he had done. The Buddha ruled that such offenses were “wrongdoing” and prescribed ways to atone.
Jizo Bodhisattva embodies the protection offered to women by the Buddha’s teachings. One legend tells of a thirteenth-century female pilgrim who spent the night in a Jizo temple in Kyoto. During the night the lecherous priest pretended to speak to her as she slept, as if it were Jizo Bodhisattva himself. He directed her to have intercourse with the first man she met the next morning as she left the temple. The next day as the priest prepared to intercept her and be the first man she met, he could not find his sandals. Jizo had hidden them. The woman met another man instead, a widower who married her (and presumably cared well for her).
Protecting the Feminine
If Jizo is a protector of women, does it mean that we, as Jizo, do not protect men? Of course not. But we have to ask, why should we, as manifestations of Jizo Bodhisattva, be particularly concerned with the protection of women? What is it in the feminine that we wish to protect?
The metta sutra instructs us,
Even as a mother protects with her life her child, her only child, so with a boundless heart should one cherish all living beings.
This word “love” is much richer in the Buddhist context than in the West. It has four aspects to be cultivated. They are metta—loving-kindness, karuna—compassion, mudita—rejoicing in another’s happiness, and upekka—equanimity. The Buddhist teacher Gunaratna distinguishes these aspects using the example of a mother’s love for her child. When she first learns that she is pregnant she is filled with loving-kindness. Even though she has never seen this being she wants to protect and care for it. When the infant is born and cries in hunger or pain, the mother feels compassion. Intuitively she feels the baby’s suffering and develops the skill to help relieve it. As the child grows and takes joy in learning to walk, play, talk, and explore the world, the mother feels sympathetic joy in the child’s happiness. She is free of jealousy. When the child grows up, moves away, and encounters problems in life, she must develop equanimity, not clinging, not becoming too anxious about the child’s individual path through life. These are all qualities manifested, transmitted, and protected by the existence of bodhisattvas. To see these qualities of love in the face of a Jizo image or manifesting in a living Jizo inspires us to recognize them as characteristics of a rare, endangered, and vital species, to cultivate them in our lives and doing so, to protect them.
Jizo Bodhisattva protects those who are helpless. A mark of civilization is the recognition that those who have less power, those who are born into less fortunate circumstances and are vulnerable, have rights that should be safeguarded. It is a mark of empathy, the recognition that any of us could, in the turning of a moment of cause and effect, be stripped of our intelligence, talent, power, money, or sexual functioning. We know, but do not want to think, that this could happen to us. Thus we are morbidly fascinated when these sudden overturnings happen to others. The Titanic sinks and hundreds of the wealthy and powerful are plunged into an icy sea. Millions have watched this occur over and over in the glow of a screen in their dry and comfortable living rooms. The handsome athletic movie star who epitomized invulnerability to us when he portrayed Superman becomes the helpless captive not of super villains but of a motorized wheelchair and a respirator after his horse stumbles. We must have reminders like these and the presence of Jizo Bodhisattva to be compassionate toward those who suffer or we risk reverting to the mind of the ruthless conqueror who tramples and gloats.
Shodo Harada Roshi has said, “N
o one should be teaching Zen unless they do not see male and female in their students.” The enlightened eye of Jizo Bodhisattva and all other Awakened Ones penetrates superficial differences and sees at the core of all beings the innate potential to awaken to the truth and manifest it fully. Jizo manifests loving-kindness toward all beings who are unseen and live in darkness just as a mother loves the unborn infant she can sense but has not yet seen. Jizo manifests compassion and brings aid to those who suffer, rejoicing in the faltering steps we make along the path. Jizo shows equanimity and optimism when we fall back into old habits that cause us difficulty.
We perceive the fragile nature of our human life and it makes us afraid. As protection against the inevitable assaults of a human life—separations, failures, abuse, illness, and death—we construct a set of strategies and defenses called a self. Each time we perceive danger we fortify the defenses until we find ourselves trapped and isolated inside its walls. Like a stone or wooden Jizo, we are frozen and lifeless. We long for—and fear—someone who can see through the thick shell to the nascent Buddha inside.
The feminine aspect recognizes and operates from the truth that we are all weak and powerless in relationship to that great power that animates our life. The feminine aspect is aware of the immensity of the field in which we are but tiny figures. It yields, surrenders. Unless we allow that feminine aspect to emerge, unless we surrender completely to That Which Is, we keep at bay that which we most desire. We must yield to our deepest yearning, and allow ourselves to be completely interpenetrated by that overwhelming mystery, to nurture it in awe within our own life. Then the wooden man will walk and the stone woman will dance. Then the Jizo Bodhisattva within us will come to life.
chapter six
The Pilrimage of Jizo Bodhisattva
Jizo Bodhisattva Page 12