This paper considers the positive and negative effects of Buddhism for women in the medieval and early Edo periods through the introduction of the apocryphal text known as the Blood Pool Hell Sutra. The rise of popularity of the sutra was connected to changing notions of purity and impurity, especially regarding thoughts about women in Japanese religion. While Buddhism suppressed and dominated women in many ways during this period, it also empowered some women. This paper will consider who produced the sutra, who disseminated it, and who its dominant audience was.
A 420-character text composed in medieval China made its way into Japanese Buddhist scripture and established women as inherently damned because of their gender. As early as 1417, a cult began to arise in Japan surrounding a text known in Japan as the Ketsubonkyo, or the Blood Pool Hell Sutra (Williams, 2005, p. 50). As Williams (2005) explains:
The text makes clear that all women, regardless of their station in this world, inevitably fell into this gruesome hell because of the evil karma accrued from their menstrual blood, and that of childbirth, which was thought to soil sacred beings (nature . . . as well as Buddhas and monks) after seeping into the water supply (p. 51).
The Blood Pool Hell was reserved strictly for women, and they could only be redeemed from it by the earthly intervention of priests and relatives, who needed to perform specific rituals that petitioned for sacred help on their behalf.
Although earlier tradition had introduced the notion of menstrual blood and the blood accompanying childbirth as an impure substance requiring cleansing in order to restore women to a more pure state, this writing built on the idea that women were inherently polluted by this discharge. The Blood Pool Hell crystalized the concept and helped codify the concept of women as a gender flawed by their very nature. Paul Groner ( ) writes, "By the late Heian per...