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Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies 8.2 (2025): 386–393; https://dx.doi.org/10.15239/hijbs.08.02.14
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Buddhist Epigraphy and Women’s History)
Medieval Japanese Studies Institute 中世日本研究所, ed. Mugai Nyodai: The Woman Who Opened Zen Gates 無外如大尼 生涯と伝承: 中近世の女性と仏. Kyoto: Shibunkaku Publishing Co. 思文閣出版, 2024. 448 pp.
Lisa KOCHINSKI
University of Southern California
kochinsk@usc.edu
Mugai Nyodai: The Woman Who Opened Zen Gates brings together an impressive array of scholarly expertise in Japanese Buddhist history, art history, historical textile analysis, and cultural and literary studies. The book was produced to coincide with the eight hundredth anniversary of the birth of the Rinzai 臨済 Abbess Mugai Nyodai 無外如大 (1223–1298). The central aim of the book is to provide an accurate account of Mugai Nyodai and her legacy by separating historical and fictional strands that became entangled over the centuries. Nyodai was long believed to have been a daughter of the Adachi 足立 warrior family, to have studied Zen in Kamakura, and to have recorded her enlightenment under the childhood name of Chiyono 千代野. Despite Barbara Ruch’s early identification of historical inconsistencies in this account, the narrative has endured.1 Mugai Nyodai offers a critical corrective by elucidating Nyodai’s biography and clarifying its conflation with that of the nun Mujaku 無著 (ca. 1250–1317) and the fictional character Chiyono.
The six chapters examine a wealth of primary source materials dating from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries, including land donation documents, letters, diaries, recorded sayings (goroku 語録), memorial and eulogy records, convent and temple records, and biographies. Entries are transcribed in the original in the Japanese section of the book and translated in the English section. Visual culture, including painted and sculpted portrait images, textiles, calligraphy, and other temple treasures, is also critically considered.
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About the Author: Lisa Kochinski earned her M.A. at Kyushu University in 2015 and received her Ph.D. from the School of Religion at the University of Southern California in 2024. She specializes in premodern Japanese religions, with research interests in Buddhist ritual and memorial culture, inter-regional exchange and transmission, and death and disaster ritual. Her dissertation traces the development of the Zen segaki 施餓鬼 ghost-feeding ritual in the late medieval period. By highlighting ritual as a response to suffering, death, and grief in periods of warfare and famine, she places the development of segaki in historical context and, in so doing, sheds light on the broader religious landscape of late medieval Japan. Lisa is currently a Visiting Scholar at the University of Southern California, where she is revising her dissertation for publication.
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
