Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 42/1: 27–70© 2015 Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture

Ryūichi Abé

Revisiting the Dragon Princess
Her Role in Medieval Engi Stories andTheir Implications in Reading the Lotus Sutra

This article examines how the Dragon Princess, one of the most celebrated
characters in the Lotus Sutra, is represented in the noh drama Ama and the
Heike Nōkyō sutra set. By doing so, it debunks the prevailing consensus inunderstanding the Dragon Princess and her episode in the sutra, and illustrates a hitherto unnoticed intrinsic affinity between medieval Japanese engi
stories and Buddhist scriptural narratives.

keywords: Lotus Sutra—Dragon Princess—henjō nanshi—ryūnyo jōbutsu—
Buddhism—gender and narrativity—Heike nōkyō—ama (female diver)

Ryūichi Abé is Edwin O. Reischauer Institute Professor of Japanese Religions, Harvard
University.

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T

he Heike nōkyō, a twelfth-century set of thirty-three scriptural scrollspreserved at Itsukushima Shrine in Hiroshima Prefecture, is one of themost sumptuous and elaborate examples of medieval Japanese illustrated
Buddhist scriptural manuscripts. One of the scrolls, the “Devadatta” chapter ofthe Lotus Sutra, bears a frontispiece that features the Dragon Princess, the celebrated protagonist of the chapter (figure 1). The illustration is arguably themost sublime representation of the princess in visual art. Although recent studies of the Dragon Princess have made her famous for her sudden change of sex
and transformation into a Buddha, the princess in the frontispiece simply offers
her jewel to the Buddha. She shows no sign of physical metamorphosis. Whatsort of interpretive strategies are required to understand her act as represented
in the frontispiece?
Engi Literature and Buddhist Scriptural Narratives

This article aims at illustrating an intrinsic affinity between medieval Japaneseengi 縁起 materials in textual, performative, and visual genres, and Buddhist
scriptural materials. The prevailing consensus among scholars has long heldthat the term engi is an appropriation of the Buddhist doctrinal term “dependent co-origination” (Sk. pratītyasaṃutpāda), which is translated in the Chinese
canon as innen shōki 因縁生起 (Ch. yinyuan shengqi) and abbreviated in morecommon use as engi (Ch. yuanqi). However, the concept of dependent coorigination means that all things in the world are intrinsically neither rising nor
ceasing; everything originates from its non-origin. Obviously such a philosophical idea would not accord well with medieval engi narratives, which are designed
to account for the specific provenance of temples, shrines, or other sacred sites,
the divinities worshipped there, and/or visual and material representations of
those divinities.
Although it is not as well known today, an alternative etymology links the word
engi to another significant Buddhist term, namely, nidāna (Jp. nidana; Ch. nituona尼陀那), which literally means origin (sho 緒), provenance (hokki 発起), cause (in因), and original cause (shoin 所因). More importantly for this article, nidāna is* All the illustrations in this article have been reproduced from images in the Itsukushima
jinja kokuhōten (Nara Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan 2005) with permissions by Nara Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan and Itsukushima Jinja. All the art objects illustrated in this article arepossessions of Itsukushima Jinja.

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abé: the dragon princess | 29

figure 1. The Dragon Princess offers her Jewel to the Buddha Frontispiece.
Scroll twelve of the Lotus Sutra in the Heike nōkyō (Itsukushima Shrine).

the name for one of the twelve categories of Buddhist scriptural discourse (Sk.
dvādaśāṅga-dharma-pravacana; Ch. shierbujing; Jp. jūnibukyō 十二部経 or 十二分経). Nidāna in this sense is translated more commonly as either engi or innen
因縁. As a category of scriptural narratives, nidāna or engi consist of stories that
aim at revealing the original cause of sermons delivered by the Buddha, vinaya
rules he established, and strange and miraculous events caused or witnessed byhim. In most cases, the origins of the events described are found in the former
lives of the Buddha or his disciples in the distant past. In that regard, nidāna areclosely linked to two other narrative categories in scriptural discourse, namely,
jātaka (Ch. bensheng; Jp. honjō 本生), stories of the Buddha’s former lives; anditivṛttaka (Ch. benshi; Jp. honji 本事), stories of the former lives of the Buddha’s
disciples, both ordained and lay.1
Because nidāna, jātaka, and itivṛttaka are often employed as elaborate, didactic narrative figures within the scriptures, they often overlap with avadāna (Ch.
piyu; Jp. hiyu 譬喩), yet another narrative entity within the twelve categories,
1. For finding how Buddhist terms in Sanskrit are translated into Chinese in the Taishō
canon, I relied on Suzuki Gakujutsu Zaidan (1986). For a general discussion of the twelve
categories in scriptural discourse, see Hirakawa (1964).

30 | Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 42/1 (2015)
which consists of teaching by means of metaphors and parables. Avadāna, too, istranslated in the Chinese canon as innen and en 縁; this indicates that stories inall these categories aim at illustrating how different causes and conditions fromone’s previous lives come together to produce a memorable event in the narrative present. In short, in the scriptural tradition, the terms in (cause 因), en (conditions 縁), and ki or gi (provenance 起) constitute basic methods for weaving
past events into stories set in the narrative present and illuminating the intricate
linkages between events across time. Naturally, in this context, questions of historical provenance, causes, and conditions are treated quite differently than theywould be if they were analyzed in terms of the philosophical concept of dependent co-origination, according to which existents are neither rising nor ceasing.
As Tokuda Kazuo (2013, 11–12) has pointed out, the terms engi and innen
were often used interchangeably in medieval Japanese society; furthermore, inthe context of proselytizing, innen meant metaphorical and didactic tales suchas hiyu 比喩, sekkyō 説教, and setsuwa 説話. Tokuda has gone on to argue thatthe simplest way to understand the word engi in the medieval Japanese context
is to see it as a type of monogatari or storytelling that has something to do withthe past origins of things and that is relevant to the worship of Buddhist andindigenous Japanese divinities. Compared to previous research, Tokuda’s interpretation thus brings the term engi much closer to the sense of nidāna, thereby
relating it to narrative categories within the Buddhist scriptural tradition. In
fact, in the world of popular medieval religious culture, the word engi had little
to do with the philosophical concept of dependent co-origination; instead, it
was closely tied to engi and innen accounts from the scriptures. In other words,
those who took part in creating and expanding the genre of medieval engi literature exerted themselves as raconteurs, not philosophers.
It is therefore possible to suggest that the narrativity of medieval Japaneseengi developed through attentive reference to the narrative discourse of the Buddhist scriptures. One example of this process can be found in the ballad dramas
Itsukushima no honji and Kumano no honji 熊野の本地, which are renowned forparallel episodes in which a princess is wrongly executed (Matsumoto 1996,
19, 87). After the burial, her beheaded body miraculously lives on to nurture
her infant child. This story is based on a sutra that revolves around the story ofa king’s former life (Zhentouyuewangjing; Jp. Sendaetsuōkyō 旃陀越王経, T no.
518, 14.791c–792a; see also Matsumoto 1996, 29). In a similar vein, many engi
episodes in the celebrated compendium Shintōshū 神道集 quote or paraphrasea range of Mahayana sutras in the process of relating the former lives of kami
in order to reveal their original identities (honji 本地) as bodhisattvas (Ōshima
2013, 329–33).
A new generation of scholars has exposed the limitations of earlier scholarship and radically expanded the range of the engi literature to include oral

abé: the dragon princess | 31

traditions, literary texts, visual culture, liturgy, rituals, preaching and proselytization, performing arts and street performances (Tokuda ed. 2013; Matsumoto
1996, 1–18; Tsutsumi 2005; Fujimaki 2013). This marks a shift away from someof the convictions of pioneering scholarship such as that of Sakurai Tokutarō,most notably by rejecting a narrow focus on “temple and shrine documents thatcarry the word engi in their titles” (Sakurai 1975, 449) and the sense that engi
texts are often faulty, unreliable, and fabricated documents.2 In newer research,
any medieval work that centers around the origin stories of temples and shrines
or other sacred sites, the divinities worshipped there, and things related to theirworship are included in the genre of engi (Hashimoto 2013). In other words,
engi literature forms a genre of its own that is expansive and “capacious” (toborrow the felicitous wording by the editors of this volume) but also loose andfluid at best. It is a genre comprised largely of materials that also belong to other,diverse genres, such as engi-e 縁起絵, etoki 絵解き, and miya-mandara 宮曼荼羅
in visual media, and sarugaku 猿楽, nō 能, kōwakamai 幸若舞, or honjimono 本
地物 in the sphere of drama and performing arts. Thus, for the purposes of thisarticle, any materials, whether historical or fictional in outlook, can be treatedas engi if they use original and foundational events to 1. legitimate sacred sites,
including temples and shrines; 2. to glorify and boast of the power of the divinities enshrined there; and 3. to propagate the worship of those divinities, theirsacred grounds, and associated institutions.
This new approach to engi is beneficial because it not only critiques the rigid
division created by modern academics between the historical and the fictional(White 1973, 43; 1978, 81) but also highlights continuity across diverse types ofmedieval Japanese narratives. The same approach also helps us to measure theimportance of an engi text not necessarily in terms of historical accuracy but
rather its ability to manifest what Giambattista Vico described as “poetic history” and “poetic logic” (Vico 1948, 112, 126, 127). That is, even with ancient narratives whose nature is essentially fantastic and mythological, it is possible torecover in their rhetorical, poetic, and metaphorical dimensions the manner inwhich relationships between the past, present, and future were imagined andused to explain new sacred events in relation to the past. Engi therefore provide
a fertile ground for investigating the historical consciousness and rationality
animating the episteme within which Japanese religious discourse operated.
What is of particular interest in this article is the element of reigen 霊験,
miraculous manifestations, as a lens through which the sacred histories of
2. To be fair, in his introductory essay to the seminal Jisha engi volume, Sakurai (1975) discussed a wide variety of materials as engi. Nonetheless, the actual texts collected in his volume
are exclusively historical documents on the origins of religious institutions. This manner of
selection demonstrates where his priority lies in envisioning the core of the engi as a genre.

32 | Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 42/1 (2015)
divinities, their home grounds, or temples and shrines that support their worship are revealed. The significance of reigen has already been noted by Sakurai (1975, 459–63). Here I wish to call attention to the fact that reigen episodes
frequently involve the death, revival, and resurrection of protagonists, thereby
acquainting their audiences with characters’ past lives in both human and nonhuman realms. In this respect, two crucial elements highlight the intertextuality of medieval engi stories and scriptural nidāna accounts. First, the narratives
traverse the cycle of transmigration by moving back and forth between past andpresent births and deaths; second, these stories result in the recovery of lost
memory or sacred knowledge from the distant past. Thus, a careful reading ofscriptural narratives can provide a key to better understand medieval Japaneseorigin stories, and vice versa.
As an example of how our readings of scripture and engi may illuminate eachother, this article focuses on engi materials concerning the Lotus Sutra’s Dragon
Princess. The first half of this article reassesses the Dragon Princess episode,as well as its reception in medieval Japan and modern academia. The second
half analyzes three diverse works about the Dragon Princess, treating each ofthem as an engi. These are the noh drama Ama, the ballad drama Itsukushima nohonji, and the frontispiece of scroll twelve of the Heike nōkyō manuscript of the
Lotus Sutra.
Reexamining the Dragon Princess Episode in the Lotus Sutra
The episode featuring the eight-year-old daughter of the Dragon King Sāgara
is one of the most celebrated stories in the Lotus Sutra and occurs in the“Devadatta” chapter, which is chapter 12 in Kumārajīva’s translation.3 During
annual lectures on the eight fascicles of the Lotus Sutra (hokke hakkō 法華八講),
Heian courtiers celebrated as particularly auspicious the day of the fifth fascicle(gokan no hi 五巻日) (Imanari 1994). This is an index of the importance of the“Devadatta” chapter as an illustration of the power of the sutra: although the
Taishō canon places the chapter in the fourth fascicle of the sutra, Heian manuscripts place it at the beginning of the fifth (Nara Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan
1979, 63, 121).
The “Devadatta” chapter consists of two parts. The first is a startling revelation by Śākyamuni Buddha that Devadatta, the Buddha’s evil cousin, is in fact
the Buddha’s good friend and teacher. In a former life, the Buddha had been a
3. Unless otherwise noted, my discussion is based on Kumārajīva’s translation of the sutra(T no. 262, 9.1–62). Although Buddhologists have long debated whether the chapter was originally included in the sutra or was a later addition, the premodern East Asian commentators andwriters discussed here all treated the chapter as a fully legitimate part of the sutra; therefore, thisdebate is not relevant to this article.

abé: the dragon princess | 33

king who sought the highest teaching of the Dharma, which a holy man livingin the mountains had mastered in the form of the Lotus Sutra. The holy man
promised the king to teach it to him if he would agree to serve as his servant.
The king accepted, and for many years he gathered firewood, collected wild
fruits and nuts, brought stream water, and prepared meals for the holy man.
In the end, the holy man, who was in fact Devadatta in a former life, taught
the king the Lotus Sutra’s teaching of the ekayāna (One Unifying Vehicle, Ch.
yicheng; Jp. ichijō 一乗). The king was reborn, eventually becoming Śākyamuni,
who expounds the sutra’s teaching on Eagle Peak before his final extinction.
In recognition of Devadatta’s contribution in a former life, the Buddha grants
him a prophecy: Devadatta is destined to attain Buddhahood in a future world(T 9.34b–35a).
The episode of the Dragon Princess immediately follows this prophecy. It
begins as Mañjuśrī engages in a conversation with the bodhisattva Accumulated
Wisdom, one of the attendants of the Tathāgata Many Treasures, who has comefrom a cosmic system in the east to visit Śākyamuni Buddha’s assembly on Eagle
Peak. Mañjuśrī tells the assembly that during a short stay in the Dragon King’s
undersea palace, whence he has just returned, he guided innumerable dragon
beings into the path of the Mahayana. As soon as he finishes speaking, a countless number of dragon bodhisattvas emerge out of the ocean palace riding on
flying lotus seats and gather in the sky over Eagle Peak. When Accumulated
Wisdom praises Mañjuśrī’s great act of guiding these beings to the bodhisattva path, Mañjuśrī explains that throughout his stay in the Dragon King’s ocean
palace, he preached only the Lotus Sutra. Accumulated Wisdom then questions
Mañjuśrī: “This sutra is extremely profound, excellent and subtle. It is the treasure among all sutras. I wonder if you found any being among your students
there who diligently applied effort to practice this sutra’s teaching and reached
Buddhahood swiftly.”4 Mañjuśrī’s answer is crucial for understanding the characterization of the Dragon Princess in the sutra:
Yes there is one! She is the Dragon King Sāgara’s daughter, who is merely eight
years old. Yet she is sharp in her capacity of wisdom and observes well how
karmic deeds play out in sentient beings’ senses. She has mastered dhāraṇī;has excelled in upholding the profoundest of the teaching of all the Buddhas, their secret treasury; has entered into deep meditation; has thoroughly
understood the nature of all things. In an instant she gave rise to the mindof enlightenment and reached the stage of non-retrogression. Her eloquenceis limitless. She loves sentient beings as if they were her own infant children.
She is perfectly endowed with merit. Whatever she thinks in her mind and4. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from primary sources are mine.

34 | Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 42/1 (2015)utters through her mouth is sublime, grand, compassionate, and kind. With
(T 9.35b)
her gentle and elegant nature, she succeeded in reaching Bodhi.

Mañjuśrī’s depiction of the Dragon Princess makes it immediately clear that
she is unusually advanced among the dragon bodhisattvas to whom he taught
the Lotus Sutra in their underwater palace. Interpreting this passage in his celebrated Lotus Sutra commentary, Fahua yishu 法華義疏, the Sanlun master Jizang
吉蔵 (549–623) identifies the princess as a bodhisattva of the tenth bodhisattva
stage (T no. 1721, 34.592b). He comments that Mañjuśrī’s statement that she hadreached “the stage of non-retrogression” stands as a testimonial that she is oneof the bodhisattvas whose grasp of the wisdom of enlightenment is equal to thatof the Buddhas (Ch. dengjue; Jp. tōgaku 等覚) and has only one more transmigratory life waiting before her attainment of Buddhahood (Ch. yisheng buchu;
Jp. isshō hosho 一生補処). That is to say, despite her appearance as “a nonhuman, female, and child,” she is at least as advanced as the bodhisattva Maitreya
regarding her reach of Buddhahood; more likely she is actually superior to him
because of what she demonstrates in the rest of her episode.5
Accumulated Wisdom, however, is unable to accept Mañjuśrī’s answer. He
says that even Śākyamuni Buddha subjected himself to austerity, accumulated
merit, and practiced the bodhisattva’s way incessantly for countless kalpas everywhere in the universe. “How then is it possible for me to believe that this girlrealized the perfect unsurpassed enlightenment of the Buddha in such a shortperiod of time?” (T 9.35b). As a careful reader of the sutra may notice, Accumulated Wisdom’s question is presented in such a way as to show that he is in fact
ignorant and has made a category mistake. On the one hand, he points to thetraining the Buddha underwent in the countless former lives of his cosmic life
span. On the other hand, he is comparing all that to a short passage of time during which the Dragon Princess received Mañjuśrī’s teaching of the Lotus Sutra
5. In agreement with Jizang, in his Miaofa lianhuajing xuanzan 妙法蓮華経玄賛 the Faxiang
School master Kuiji 窺基 (632–682) identifies the Dragon Princess as a bodhisattva of the tenthstage (T no. 1723, 34.816c). In addition, he notes that the Dragon Princess achieved enlightenment in a short moment of time because of her sixteen virtuous powers: “1. She belongs to thedragon race; 2. is a woman; 3. is a child; 4. is intelligent; 5. is knowledgeable; 6. has mastered allsorts of dhāraṇi and sutra teachings; 7. has mastered meditation; 8. understands the nature of allthings; 9. is resolute and non-retrogressive; 10. has a gift of eloquence; 11. is compassionate andkind; 12. is virtuous; 13. is quick-witted; 14. is profound in her speech; 15. is humane and modest;
16. is gentle and elegant” (T no. 1723, 34.816b). It is noteworthy that Kuiji here lists the princess’s
status as a nonhuman, a female, and a child among her obvious assets. That is, like the celebrated
goddess in the Vimalakīrti Sutra (T no. 475, 15.547c–548a), the Dragon Princess represents the
Mahayana philosophical stand of nonduality, in which it is asserted that the ability to attain
Buddhahood has nothing at all to do with a practitioner’s physical appearance, whether male orfemale.

abé: the dragon princess | 35

in her ocean palace. That “Accumulated Wisdom” is unable to imagine that the
Dragon Princess may very well have undergone all kinds of excellent training in
her former lives puts an ironic spin on the very name of this bodhisattva.
One of the most common premises in the Lotus Sutra’s narratives is that thosedisciples to whom the Buddha grants prophecies of their attainment of Buddhahood in the distant future have all studied the Lotus Sutra in their former lives
but have completely forgotten their education (Abé 2005). The Buddha is now
instructing them in the sutra’s ekayāna teaching as a reminder. When bestowing
a prophecy on Śāriputra, the Buddha has this to say:In the distant past, under the twenty thousand million Buddhas, I constantly
guided you in the path that leads to the unsurpassed Way. For a long night oftransmigratory lives you followed me and studied under me. Because I have
employed expedient means to lead you, you have attained a birth in this life as
my disciple again.… But now you, Śāriputra, have forgotten that completely
and have thought that you have attained your final goal of nirvana. Therefore I
now make you recall the way that you originally pursued. For that reason andfor the sake of all the arhats, I expound this Mahayana sutra that is entitledthe Exquisite Lotus, the Dharma for Instructing Bodhisattvas, the Dharma Pro(T 9.11b)
tected by the Minds of the Buddhas.

This speech by the Buddha is indicative of the sutra’s grand narrative: incountless previous life existences, the Buddha taught the Lotus Sutra and guided
innumerable beings on the path toward the attainment of the perfect enlightenment of the Buddhas. In clear contrast to Śāriputra and many other disciples
marked in the sutra by their lost memory, Mañjuśrī, the Dragon Princess’ teacher,is introduced as the one disciple who is capable of retaining his memories ofstudying the ekayāna in the distant past. In the introductory chapter, before
he begins his sermon on Eagle Peak, the Buddha sits in meditation and enters
into a samādhi entitled “innumerable meanings.” In his meditation the Buddha
issues forth beams of light from the white tuft on his forehead, thereby illuminating countless world systems where innumerable beings excellently practice
Buddhism. No one in the assembly but Mañjuśrī is able to understand the gravity of this unprecedented event. Then Mañjuśrī relates the “engi story” for the
Buddha’s innumerable meanings samādhi. In a previous life existence, Mañjuśrī
was a bodhisattva named Sublimely Bright and was studying under the Buddha
Sun Moon Radiance. Before that Buddha’s final extinction, he entered that same“innumerable meaning samādhi,” and then preached the highest Dharma of theekayāna, which integrates within itself all sorts of Buddhist teachings. Since thattime, all the Buddhas in cosmic history who expounded the ekayāna teaching of
the Lotus Sutra practiced this unusual samādhi prior to their final preaching andextinction. Mañjuśrī therefore foretells that the time for the aging Śākyamuni

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Buddha to go into his nirvana is drawing near, but that the assembly at Eagle
Peak will get a chance to listen to the Buddha’s teaching of the ultimate
Mahayana (T 9.3c–5b). Because of his unexcelled capacity, Mañjuśrī is given
the task of acting as caretaker of the ekayāna after the passing of the Buddha(T 9.37a–39c), and in chapter 24, “Bodhisattva Exquisite Sound,” he serves as thehost when the Buddha’s assembly on Eagle Peak welcomes a bodhisattva from aworld system in the eastern universe who is renowned for his unusually excellent grasp of ekayāna (T 9.55b–56b).
Therefore, in the larger context of the sutra’s narrative, the conversation
between Mañjuśrī and Accumulated Wisdom regarding the Dragon Princess’
enlightenment is an exchange between the one who remembers and the otherwho forgot. Mañjuśrī is fully cognizant of events of the distant past—the “engi”
in which characters’ previous life existences intertwine through the progress ofspiritual training. In contrast, Accumulated Wisdom is devoid of such memory:
he cannot even begin to imagine the engi—the story of the Dragon Princess’s
previous lives—that must have enabled her to make such great accomplishments in her current life. Grounding himself in insight into practitioners’ spiritual progress in their past lives, Mañjuśrī chooses the Dragon Princess as themost advanced bodhisattva, one who has already attained perfect enlightenment. Accumulated Wisdom’s objection derives from his ignorance and should
therefore be understood as a rhetorical question. When he asks, “How then is it
possible for me to believe that this girl realized the perfect unsurpassed enlightenment of the Buddha in such a short period of time?,” he actually confirms thatthe princess is a very special practitioner who has realized the perfect unsurpassed enlightenment of the Buddha. For that reason, Mañjuśrī does not evenneed to answer Accumulated Wisdom. The Dragon Princess suddenly manifests
herself before the Buddha. Having prostrated herself in reverence to him, andthen having seated herself in a corner of the assembly, she praises him with agāthā and expresses her resolve to save living beings.
When the Dragon Princess has announced in her verse to the Buddha her
vow to engage in salvific acts that benefit living beings, it is Śāriputra who now
opposes her. He says that he is not able to accept her enlightenment because
he believes that a woman’s body is soiled and thus cannot serve as a vessel toadvance the Mahayana. Śāriputra supports his point by referring to “fiveobstructions” (Sk. pañca-āvaraṇa; Ch. wuzhang; Jp. goshō 五障) for women: thatthey are unable to become Brahmā, Indra, Māra, a cakravartin, or a Buddha.6
The Dragon Princess presents a rejoinder to both Accumulated Wisdom andŚāriputra through not words but action. She offers to the Buddha her legendary
6. For a general discussion of the five obstructions and their implications for Japanese poetry
and poetics, see Kamens (1993, 393–94, 401).

abé: the dragon princess | 37

jewel whose worth is equal to the entire universe system, and he immediately
accepts it. Having seen the Buddha receive her jewel, the Dragon Princess turns
to Accumulated Wisdom and Śāriputra and asks whether or not the manner inwhich the Buddha accepted the jewel was swift. They answer her in unison: “Itwas very swift.” Her act of offering the jewel and the Buddha’s acceptance of it
create a crucial moment of transition, after which the episode moves into its
finale. The significance of this vignette will be further discussed in relationshipto the Heike nōkyō frontispiece in the last section of this article.
After giving the Buddha her jewel, the Dragon Princess tells her audience:“Use your supernatural power and watch me attain Buddhahood. It will be evenfaster!” (T 9.35c). That she urges them to employ their supernatural power makes
it clear that what happens next takes place as a vision, a vision she prepares as
an expedient means to help them see what Mañjusrī has already told them: that
there is a perfect wisdom of enlightenment within a small girl of the dragon
race.7At that time everyone in the Buddha’s assembly saw, within an instant flickerof time, the Dragon Princess transform herself into a man, complete all his
bodhisattva practices, travel to the Spotless World in the south, sit on the jeweled lotus seat, realize the complete unsurpassed Bodhi, have his body adorned
with thirty-two major and eighty minor auspicious marks, and preach theexquisite dharma [of the Lotus Sutra] for all sentient beings in the ten directions. At that time in our Sahā World, all bodhisattvas, śrāvakas, heavenly
beings, and dragons in the eight tribes, humans and nonhumans alike, saw
in the furthest distance that the Dragon Princess attained Buddhahood andbroadly preached the Dharma. They all gave rise to great bliss in their minds
and sent their reverence to her in a far distant land.
Countless sentient beings in her assembly who heard her Dharma preachingrealized enlightenment and reached the stage of non-retrogression. Countlessother beings in her assembly received her prophecy of their future attainment of Buddhahood. Her Spotless World trembled in six different ways [tocelebrate her preaching]. In our Sahā World, three thousand sentient beings
advanced to abide in the stage of non-retrogression. Another three thousand
gave rise to the mind of attaining enlightenment and received prophecies of
their future Buddhahood. Accumulated Wisdom, Śāriputra, and all in theassembly [on Eagle Peak] remained silent and faithfully accepted what theysaw.
(T 9.35c)
7. The Dragon Prince episode itself does not tell its readers if this is a vision of somethingthat actually happens far away in the Spotless World or if the vision itself is fictional. However,that may not matter much because as discussed below, the central theme of the episode is not
the Dragon Girl’s physical transformation into a Buddha but rather her inner enlightenment andresulting salvific power.

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This passage concludes both the Dragon Princess episode and the “Devadatta” chapter as a whole. In the very last sentence, Accumulated Wisdom andŚāriputra are simply dumbfounded by her vision and accept their defeat insilence. Their defeat means the defeat of all their arguments for women’s inability to attain enlightenment.
It is important to note that Chinese exegetes categorically rejected Śāriputra’s
claim that women cannot attain Buddhahood. The Tiantai patriarch Zhiyi 智顗(538–597), for example, writes in his Fahua wenguo 法華文句:
As for Māra, Brahmā, Indra, and women as well, without abandoning theirbodies, without taking up other bodies, and in their apparent current bodies,
they are capable of attaining Buddhahood. Therefore, it is said in a verse:
The nature of the Dharma is like a great ocean
in which there is no need to distinguish good and bad;ordinary beings and holy beings are equal;
there is no high and low between them.
When the mind’s stains cease, as swiftly as flipping a palm,
one attains the proof of enlightenment.
(T no. 1718, 34.117a)8

Other seminal Chinese readings of the Lotus Sutra, including those by Kuiji
and Zhanran 湛然 (711–782), fully agree with Zhiyi regarding the five obstructions (T no. 1723, 34.816c–817a; no.1719, 34.314b–c). In fact, I have found no major
Sui or Tang Chinese commentaries that attempt to substantiate Śāriputra’s claim
as a basis for establishing women’s inferiority in their pursuit of spiritual progress. Zhiyi’s observation affirms that in the Dragon Princess episode, Śāriputra,
just like Accumulated Wisdom, is presented as a counterpoint in order toemphasize that the princess’s unusual enlightenment was simply beyond thearhat’s grasp. In other words, Śāriputra’s point about the five obstructions, justlike Accumulated Wisdom’s objection to the Dragon Princess’ enlightenment,
should be understood rhetorically; it is aimed at disclosing his ignorance anddramatizing his defeat.
Śāriputra’s role in this part of the Lotus Sutra narrative closely resembles
the one he plays in the goddess episode of the Vimalakīriti Sutra (T no. 475,
15.547c–548c; Paul 1985, 221–32). In the Vimalakīrti Sutra, Śāriputra, the proud
leader of the celibate male clergy, is unable to understand that the Goddess, who
had been studying under the householder Vimalakīrti for many years, is a very
advanced bodhisattva with a fine grasp of the nature of emptiness as nonduality.
In order to guide Śāriputra, the Goddess manifests a vision in which her bodyand Śāriputra’s body are switched. Having seen himself as female and the God8. Zhiyi notes that he bases his argument here on the Sutra for the Matrix of Bodhisattva(T no. 384, 12.1015–1058; 菩薩胎経 [Ch. Pusa taijing; Jp. Bosatsu taikyō]).

abé: the dragon princess | 39

dess in the form of himself, Śāriputra finally frees himself from his androcentricbias, accepts her as his teacher, and is able to enter into the dharma gate of nonduality. At the end of the episode, Vimalakīrti tells Śāriputra that the Goddess
in her previous lives trained herself under ninety-two million Buddhas. Just
like the Dragon Princess, she has already reached the bodhisattva stage of nonretrogression (T 15.548c). Here, too, Śāriputra plays the role of a foil to bring to
the fore the exceptional spiritual quality of the female protagonist.
The vision manifested by the Dragon Princess should be understood in thesame way as the Goddess’ sex change. As Zhiyi made clear, the princess did notneed to abandon her body and take up another body, even if it were the body ofa Buddha. However, to emancipate Accumulated Wisdom and Śāriputra fromtheir biases and limitations, as an expedient means, she kindly manifested avision of her attaining Buddhahood in the manner they are able to understandand “swallow” even with their imperfect abilities.
The ending also shows that the most outstanding quality of the princess rests
not in her appearance in a Buddha’s body, nor even in her perfect enlightenment, but rather in her skillful employment of expedient means to save beings.
Zhiyi paid particular attention to the Dragon Princess’ unusually impressive display of expedient means. Regarding her transformation into a Buddha in the
Spotless World, he states:
Both humans and heavenly beings took delight in what they saw and received
benefit from it.… Exactly when her karmic link to our land was fading, sheguided living beings. That was all made possible by her power of expedientmeans by which she attained one Buddha body, all Buddha bodies, and thesamādhi of manifesting all physical bodies.
(T no. 1718, 34.117a)

Just watching the Dragon Princess’s attainment of Buddhhood in a faraway
land, three thousand beings in Śākyamuni Buddha’s assembly on Eagle Peak
took a great leap forward to reach the “bodhisattva stage of non-retrogression.”In other words, her visual expedient means spurred them on in their spiritualcultivation, so much so that they become comparable to the princess as she had
been when she was first introduced by Mañjuśrī. Furthermore, another three
thousand in the assembly received the Buddha’s prophecy of their future attainment of Buddhahood.
Zhiyi’s statement “exactly when her karmic link to our land was fading, sheguided living beings” draws a strong parallel between the Dragon Princess andthe Buddha. That is because according to the Lotus Sutra’s narrative, the Buddha, too, expounded the ekayāna to save beings in an unprecedented manner
exactly when his extinction was drawing near, when his “karmic link to our land
was fading.” It is not her attainment of inner perfect enlightenment but rather
her outer, visual expedient means that influences the audience on Eagle Peak,40 | Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 42/1 (2015)
demonstrating that she has fulfilled her vow of saving living beings. The Dragon
Princess episode shows, therefore, that the ultimate proof of her attainment of
Buddhahood lies in her ability to employ expedient means to save beings, not in
her appearance, even if that appearance takes the form of a Buddha’s body.
In that regard Zhiyi’s last sentence in the quote above is noteworthy. In chapter 16, “Eternal Life of the Tathāgata,” the Buddha proclaims that it has in fact
been more than innumerable kalpas since he first attained the unsurpassed perfect Bodhi. Since his attainment, he has been known as Dīpaṁkara Buddha (Ch.
Randeng fo; Jp. Nentō butsu 然燈佛) and countless other Buddhas who rose inthis Sahā World and numerous other worlds. Each of them took their extinction and, before they did so, preached the dharma of the Lotus Sutra and guided
beings by skillfully employing expedient means. The Buddha thus states that
his life will continue indefinitely because even after he, as Śākyamuni Buddha,
passes into extinction, his life will go on in the forms of countless Buddhas andbodhisattvas who will teach the Lotus Sutra in the future (T no. 262, 9.42b–c).9
Zhiyi has identified the Dragon Princess with all these innumerable spiritualleaders who are none other than the single Buddha of eternal life, precisely
because he sees her salvific power as comparable to that manifested by the Buddha in the sutra. Here again, at the conclusion of the Dragon Princess episode,
Zhiyi reconfirms that its theme is the prioritization of expedient means over theattainment of a Buddha body.
Problematizing henjō nanshi and ryūnyo jōbutsu
In light of the foregoing review of the Dragon Princess episode in the Lotus
Sutra, it seems puzzling that almost all modern scholarly inquiries into this episode have focused narrowly on two concepts: henjō nanshi 変成男子, her transformation into a male, which is said to have enabled her to complete all requisitebodhisattva training at lightning speed; and ryūnyo jōbutsu 龍女成仏, that is, herinstantaneous attainment of Buddhahood in a distant Buddha-world in a southern corner of the universe.
In medieval Japan certain Buddhist doctrinaires dared to misread this episode, totally ignoring the tradition of Chinese Buddhist commentaries on it inorder to combine these two ideas in such a way as to form a particularly discriminatory theory against female practitioners. According to their henjō nanshiryūnyo jōbutsu theory, the Dragon Princess stands for all female practitionersof Buddhism: because of their intrinsic defilement, which Śāriputra identifies
as the “five obstructions,” women are denied salvation. Only by means of their
9. For the significance of the Buddha’s eternal life and ekayāna as the two essential themes of
the Lotus Sutra, see Suguro (2001).

abé: the dragon princess | 41

thorough devotion to the Lotus Sutra can they be saved, and even then, they firstmust be reborn as men. Although the terms henjō nanshi and ryūnyo jōbutsu do
appear in the Dragon Princess episode (T 9.35c), they describe her visual expedient means, which awaken Accumulated Wisdom and Śāriputra from their ignorance, and therefore cannot be substantiated as conditions essential to women’ssalvation.
One articulation of the discriminatory Japanese henjō nanshi-ryūnyo jōbutsu
discourse occurs in the work of the late-Heian scholar monk Chinkai 珍海(1091–1152), who was renowned for his combined study of the Sanron school
and Pure Land Buddhism. In his Bodaishinshū, Chinkai explains the claim that
only men inhabit Amitābha Buddha’s Pure Land of Extreme Bliss through reference to the Dragon Princess’ sex change. Specifically, he urges women: “Ifyou seek rebirth in the Pure Land, cast away your female body” (530a–b). In
his Keiran shūyōshū 渓嵐拾葉集, the scholar monk of Tendai esotericism Kōshū
光宗 (1276–1350) expands on the conviction that women’s bodies are soteriological liabilities by discussing the Dragon Princess’s “dragon-animal body,” “female
body,” and “child body” as manifestations, respectively, of rage, greed, and folly(T no. 2410, 76.599a–b)—the three poisons of delusion, which in turn symbolize
both the dragon race’s karmic suffering in their abysmal realm and women’s suffering in this world (Yamamoto 1993, 248).
Obviously, such readings of the Dragon Princess episode deviate egregiously
from the way in which her character is constructed in the Lotus Sutra’s narrative.
As these two examples show, the henjō nanshi-ryūnyo jōbutsu theory vulgarlydisregards how her role in the sutra is developed in relationship to Mañjuśrī,the Buddha, Accumulated Wisdom, and Śāriputra. First, it negligently conflates
the attainment of perfect enlightenment with finding refuge from samsāric suffering. In the Dragon Princess episode, she is presented not as a sufferer but as
the leader among bodhisattvas, one who manifests unusual salvific power. As
Kuiji’s comments made clear, the Dragon Princess—a nonhuman, a female, anda child—showcases the universal possibility that all sorts of beings can masterthe teaching of the Lotus Sutra. The sutra does not use her to place women at a
disadvantage in spiritual cultivation.
Furthermore, the henjō nanshi–ryūnyo jōbutsu theory refuses to comprehend
that in this episode Śāriputra is a foil: his purpose in the narrative is to highlightthe superiority of the Dragon Princess. Instead, the theory attempts to substantiate
his claim that there are five obstacles for women. It is true that the “five obstructions” are mentioned in other Buddhist scriptural sources; however, what exactly
constitutes the five obstacles differs from one source to another. For instance, inDharmarakṣa’s translation of the Lotus Sutra (T no. 263, 9.106a), as well as in the
Nepali edition of the Lotus Sutra (Kern 1963, 252), the fifth item (“Buddha”) is
replaced respectively by “mahāsattva” and “the rank of a bodhisattva incapable

42 | Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 42/1 (2015)of retrogression.” In other words, these texts have Śāriputra assert that women
cannot become highly advanced great bodhisattvas. By this point in the narrative, however, Mañjuśrī has already introduced the Dragon Princess as an exceptionally great bodhisattva in the stage of non-retrogression. Thus, these versionsof the sutra make it even more obvious that Śāriputra’s objection is meant to be
immediately denied when the princess manifests her vision. Within the episode’s
narrative development, then, it is impossible to substantiate the idea that the five
obstructions would block her (or any other female) from attaining Buddhahood.
Finally, the henjō nanshi-ryūnyo jōbutsu theory’s emphasis on women’s bodies
as sources of defilement runs utterly counter to the central motif of the Dragon
Princess episode. The characterization of an eight-year-old nonhuman girl as theone who has grasped the unsurpassed enlightenment of the Buddhas purposely
debunks a conventional view that equates attaining Buddhahood with acquiring
the adult male body of a Buddha. On this point the Sanlun master Jizang points
out in his Fahua yishu that in contrast to Śākyamuni Buddha, who attained theBuddhahood that demonstrates expedient means in both sudden and gradualforms, the Dragon Princes realized the Buddhahood that employs expedientmeans whose nature is sudden. Thus, in contrast to Śākyamuni’s enlightenedbody, which is that of a full-grown adult, the Dragon Princess manifests her
enlightened body as an innocent child. Jizang also states that while Śākyamuni isamong the Buddhas who showed his Buddha body as a male, the princess belongs
to a different group of Buddhas whose enlightened bodies consist of both female
and male manifestations (T no. 1721, 34.592b–c). As Jizang makes clear, the princess stands as proof that genuine inner enlightenment can be realized regardlessof one’s physical appearance or sex. In chapter 25, “Universal Gate of Bodhisattva
Avalokiteśvara,” it is said that the celebrated bodhisattva who is introduced inthis chapter saves sentient beings universally by manifesting himself in thirtythree different forms. The twenty-fourth transformation is a “body of a young
girl,” and the twenty-sixth, a “body of a dragon” (T 9.57b). Here as well, there isno intrinsic separation between being a female, child, and nonhuman on the one
hand and being an enlightened being on the other.
Overall, the henjō nanshi-ryūnyo jōbutsu theory sees the Dragon Princess
as being paired with Devadatta in the same chapter because she is as sinful as
Devadatta. However, in the sutra’s narrative she is presented as a figure who isspiritually far more advanced than Devadatta. Whereas the Buddha’s prophecy
explains that Devadatta will become the Tathāgata Heavenly King in the world
system Heavenly Way only after spending countless lives as a bodhisattva, theDragon Princess needs neither the Buddha’s assurance nor an encouraging
prophecy of future attainment. By her own power alone, in an instant of her own
visual expedient means, she gives proof of her own genuine enlightenment rightbefore the eyes of the Buddha, Śāriputra, and all the others in the assembly onabé: the dragon princess | 43

Eagle Peak. The stark contrast between the indirectness of the Buddha’s recounting of Devadatta’s enlightenment in a far distant future and the immediacy ofthe princess’s enlightenment creates the chapter’s dramatic effect.
Precisely because of its perceived deviation from the sutra episode, the henjō
nanshi-ryūnyo jōbutsu theory encountered serious opposition in medieval Japan.
In the “Uji jūjō” 宇治十帖 books of the Tale of Genji, one finds examples thattreat the idea of the “five obstructions” with cynicism and suspicion (Kobayashi
1987). Similarly, in her poetry, Princess Senshi 選子内親王 (964–1035) expresses
her view that the belief in the five obstructions itself is a hindrance to women’s
spiritual progress (Hosshin wakashū, 396). Edward Kamens (1993, 400) has aptly
pointed out that in one of her poems, Senshi shows that the Dragon Princess’s
greatness rests neither in her sex change nor attainment of the Buddha’s bodybut rather her power of saving beings. Similarly, Lori Meeks (2007) has identified in the aforementioned Bodaishinshū the voices of lay female practitioners
who utterly disagreed with Chinkai’s view of women and their rebirth in thePure Land. Meeks argues that these voices reflect the practice developed by
the ladies of the Heian court in which they aimed at attaining rebirth in Maitreya’s pure land (where women were said to be permitted) and devoted themselves to the ten rākṣasī ladies led by Samantabhadra (Fugen jūrasetsunyo 普賢十羅刹女), former man-eater ogresses who turned themselves into champions of
the Dharma without casting away their female bodies.
It must also be mentioned that there were eminent scholar monks who utterly
opposed the henjō nanshi-ryūnyo jōbutsu theory. For example, in his Hokke
kaijishō 法華開示抄, the Hossō master Jōkei 貞慶 (1155–1213) of Kōfukuji praises
the Dragon Princess as an unprecedentedly advanced bodhisattva; in doing so,
he carefully paraphrases the arguments developed by Kuiji (T no. 2195, 56.392a–b, 394c). Even more radically than Jōkei, Dōgen 道元 (1200–1253) categoricallydenies women’s disadvantage regarding the attainment of enlightenment in an
essay entitled “Raihai tokuzui” 礼拝得髄 in his Shōbōgenzō 正法眼蔵 collection.
He urges all monks who seek the Dharma to prostrate themselves before a nun
who has grasped the Dharma. He also states that whoever masters the Buddha
Dharma is entitled to be the leader of the saṃgha, even if she is a seven-year-old
girl just like the Dragon Princess. In this manner, Dōgen dismisses any interpretation of the Dragon Princess episode as grounds for discriminating against
women (Terada and Mizuno 1979, 321–23).10
In short, two opposing readings of the “Devadatta” chapter of the Lotus Sutra
operated in medieval Japanese society. One aimed at advancing an androcentric theory in which the Dragon Princess was misappropriated as evidence for10. For other examples of medieval Japanese texts that express their objection to the idea of
women’s inferiority in practicing Buddhism, see Taira (1990) and McCormick (2013; 2014).

44 | Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 42/1 (2015)
women’s inferiority and defilement, whereas the other recognized her role inthe sutra’s narrative, remained faithful to continental exegetical traditions, anddeveloped a network of what might be called anti-henjō nanshi-ryūnyo jōbutsu
discourse.11 It is beyond the scope of this article to give a survey of how theformer gained broad currency in late medieval and early modern Japan. Suffice
it to say, however, that there was no sign of theories of gender discrimination
grounded in the Dragon Princess episode during the Nara period or earlier—the age when Japanese Buddhist scholasticism developed by avidly modelingitself on continental traditions.12 Nor did continental East Asia see the rise of
any analogous theory asserting the need for women to change their sex to attainsalvation (see, for instance, Levering 1982, 22, 30–32). The henjō nanshi-ryūnyo
jōbutsu theory was thus a product of a particular section of the medieval Japanese Buddhist community and cannot serve as the sole standard for assessing
the significance of the Lotus Sutra’s Dragon Princess episode and its influence.
Nevertheless, a majority of modern and contemporary inquiries into the Dragon
Princess approach her through the ideas of henjō nanshi and ryūnyo jōbutsu. Manyof them probe into rather esoteric and thaumaturgic aspects of this discriminatory medieval theory—for example, henjō nanshihō 変成男子法, an esoteric ritual
aimed at transforming women into men for their salvation (Yamamoto 1993,
258–64)—and thus eventually aggrandize it. More constructively, other research
employs the methods of gender studies or women’s history in order to critique
the way in which such a discriminatory discourse defined women’s salvation.
Either way, however, other significant elements in the episode—such as theprincess’s offering of the jewel to the Buddha, her vow of saving beings, and theextraordinary effects resulting from the vision of her attaining Buddhahood, allof which to this author are far more important than henjō nanshi and ryūnyo
11. It has been pointed out that ryūnyo jōbutsu was an important doctrinal idea within theTendai School. In response to Kūkai’s theory of sokushin jōbutsu 即身成仏, attaining enlightenment within one’s lifetime, which highlights his Esoteric Buddhism, Saichō 最澄 (767–822) usedthe Dragon Princess’ instantaneous attainment of Buddhahood to argue that sokushin jōbutsu is
not a monopoly of the Kūkai’s Shingon School but can be achieved within the framework of his
Tendai Lotus School (Hokke shūku, 261; see also Ōkubo 2006; 2014). However, that alone would
not have spawned the henjō nanshi-ryūnyo jōbutsu theory as a gender discriminatory discourse.
In contrast to the Pure Land Buddhists’ claim that women need to be reborn as male before they
are allowed to enter the Pure Land, sokushin jōbutsu by definition does not require them to go
through either sex change or another transmigratory rebirth. In other words, if the henjō nanshiryūnyo jōbutsu theory had sokushin jōbutsu as a premise, the theory would contradict itself (see,for example, Taira 1992, 408–15).
12. Myōitsu 明一 (728–798), for example, a leading Tōdaiji scholar priest of the Nara period,
discusses the “Devadatta” chapter only in terms of its salvific power, making no mention at all ofryūnyo jōbutsu or henjō nanshi. See his Hokke ryakushō 法華略抄 (T no. 2188, 56.140b–c); see also
Yoshida (1989, 58–60).

abé: the dragon princess | 45

jōbutsu—have escaped the attention of students of the Lotus Sutra. As will be
discussed in the following sections, there are noteworthy examples in the medieval engi literature that concern exactly these aspects of the Dragon Princess
narrative. They constituted a significant part of the medieval anti-henjō nanshiryūnyo jōbutsu discourse, preventing the Dragon Princess from being reduced
to the symbol of women’s inferiority, preserving her positive role as she appears
in the sutra, and creating new forms of art and literature from a propitious reading of her character.
The Dragon Princess and the Legendary Origins of Shido Temple
Ama 海士, one of the oldest noh dramas, is said to be by Konparu Gonnokami
金春権守 (n.d.), the head of a Kōfukuji-based Sarugaku troupe active in the middle of the fourteenth century and grandfather to the celebrated noh dramatist
and theoretician Konparu Zenchiku 金春禅竹 (1405–1471).13 The drama revolves
around the heroic and tragic adventures of a female diver on the shore of Shido
bay 志度之浦 in Sanuki province. She sacrifices herself to steal back a legendary
jewel from the Dragon King’s palace for her husband, who is none other than the
court minister Fujiwara no Fuhito 藤原不比等 (695–720). The noh drama generally bases itself on the older legendary origin story of Shido Temple, Sanshū
Shido dojō engi 讚州志度道場縁起.14 In the Shido Temple origin story, when thediver dies, Fuhito prophesies that because of the merit of her heroic self-sacrifice
she will be reborn in her next life as the Dragon Princess. Years later, their son,
Fujiwara no Fusazaki 藤原房前 (681–732), visits Shido, where he makes a generous offering to a small hall that his father built for the diver, transforming it
into a majestic monastic complex. The noh drama distinguishes itself from thetemple’s origin story in that the diver manifests herself to Fusazaki as the Dragon
Princess and informs him that thanks to his filial devotion, she has been able
to find spiritual repose. Her dance of bliss and her act of handing a scroll of the
Lotus Sutra to Fusazaki mark the final climax of the drama.
13. Royall Tyler (1992, 23) has discussed the historical background for this play and has suggested that its ending may be an addition by Zeami 世阿弥. For the Japanese text, I have relied on
the annotated edition in Nishino (1998, 573–80).
14. For photo reproductions and an annotated print edition of this engi text as preserved at
Shidoji, see Wada (1967, 52–65). The Sanshū shido dojō engi is the second of a series of sevenengi stories that concern Shido Temple, all of which are included in Wada (1967). The first six
have extant corresponding engi-e, origin story paintings; these too are preserved at Shidoji (seeUmezu 1968, 158). For a range of primary sources of the origin stories, see Ōhashi (2001); forscholarly literature in Japanese on the origin stories, see Sano Midori (2010, 38). As Melanie
Trede (1999, 63) has discussed in detail, the engi resembles the Kōwakamai play Taishokkan
大織冠, which most likely came into existence about the same time as Ama (see also Abe 1986).

46 | Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 42/1 (2015)
The diver’s superhuman acts, her fateful link to the jewel, and the realizationof Fuhito’s prophecy, namely, her manifestation as the Dragon Princess, makethis noh drama resonate with the Dragon Princess episode in the Lotus Sutra.
Ama begins with a scene in the imperial court at Nara in which Fusazaki hears
an aristocratic peer saying that Fusazaki’s mother was of a low birth and, in fact,
a diver who died offshore in Shido Bay in Sanuki. Though Fusazaki is only thirteen years old, he is already a powerful courtier because his father, Fuhito, hasdesignated him heir to the Fujiwara clan. Desirous of learning more about his
mother and her untimely death, Fusazaki departs to Sanuki Province accompanied by his retinue. Having arrived on the shore of Shido Bay at dusk, hecomes across a village woman who happens to be a diver. He asks her to remove
seaweed from the shallows nearby because it is blocking his view of the moonreflected in the water; this image is suggestive of her future enlightenment.
The village woman tells Fusazaki that something similar to his request washeard by a village diver in the past when another courtier visited Shido village.
She begins to relate to him a local story: a long time ago an aristocrat disguised
himself as a commoner, settled in Shido, and married the diver, who soon gavebirth to a boy. Then, the courtier revealed his true identity, Lord Fujiwara no
Fuhito, and asked her to travel to the Dragon King’s palace at the bottom of thesea to retrieve a jewel that had been sent by Emperor Gaozu of Tang 唐高祖 toKōfukuji, the Fujiwara clan temple in Nara. This jewel, known as Menkō fuhai
no tama 面向不背之珠 , “Jewel That Never Turns Away,” was the most precious
treasure of the Chinese empire: a crystal sphere containing at its core a redwood
image of the Buddha. From whichever direction one gazes into it, the Buddha
always faces the viewer. This wonderful jewel represents Fujiwara connections
with the Chinese throne: after hearing of the peerless beauty of Lady Kōhaku
紅白女, Fuhito’s sister, Emperor Gaozu sought to make her his queen. When
Lady Kōhaku accepted the emperor’s proposal and arrived in the Tang court, theemperor sent the jewel as a gift to honor the Fujiwara house. The Dragon King,
however, heard that the jewel was traveling to Japan and grew covetous of thegem. When the ship carrying it reached Shido, the Dragon King had his powerful water-creature retainers snatch the treasure away. Thus, the invaluable Jewel
That Never Turns Away was lost in the sea and taken to the abysmal realm of
the dragons. Fuhito’s diver wife accepted his request to retrieve this jewel on one
condition: that their son be named the sole heir of the Fujiwara house. When she
succeeded in recapturing it—but only by throwing away her own life—Fuhito
kept his promise and made their son his heir, the Minister Fusazaki.
Hearing his own name uttered by the village woman, Fusazaki tells her: “But
I am none other than the Minister Fusazaki!” Now realizing that the aristocratic
visitor before her has an immediate karmic link to the story she has recounted,
the village woman goes on to tell Fusazaki how courageously the diver, hisabé: the dragon princess | 47

mother, retrieved the jewel from the Dragon King’s palace. She tied a thousandfathom rope around her waist and jumped into the sea from a boat on which
Fuhito rode. Plunging straight into the dragon castle, she found the jewel glowing atop a soaring tower there. Monstrous sea creatures guarded the enshrined
treasure, but, having offered a prayer to the bodhisattva Kannon on Shido Bay15
and holding a dagger at her forehead, she rushed to the tower and took away
the jewel. As she fled, furious guards pursued her closely, and the diver realizedthat she had no chance to escape their reach. Therefore she gouged a deep cut
under her own breast and hid the jewel inside. Fearful of the pollution of death,the sea creatures gave up their chase. Just before she fainted, the diver pulled
the rope with all her remaining power. When the crew of the boat pulled her up
to the ocean surface, the sight of the damaged body of his dying wife saddened
Fuhito. He saw no sign of the jewel; before she passed away, however, with herlast breath the diver told Fuhito to look underneath her breast, where he found
the radiant jewel within her wound.
This scene of the diver’s self-sacrifice shows that she physically internalizes
the jewel. The jewel becomes a part of her body even if that causes her to die. In
establishing her identity with the jewel, this heroic act creates a powerful condition, or en, that destines her to be reborn as the Dragon Princess in her nexttransmigratory life.
In an episode omitted in the noh drama, the Sanshū shido dōjō engi has
Fuhito make his son bid farewell to his mother on the boat, as if to make surethat the infant understands that she sacrificed herself for him. Not knowing that
his mother is now dead, the infant suckles at her empty breast and brings all
aboard the boat to tears. (This vignette resembles the comparable scene in the
Itsukushima no honji discussed in the next section of this article.) Right next
to her grave site, Fuhito erects a small hall and names it Shido Dōjō 死度道場,
Temple for the Salvation of the Deceased. Acknowledging the extraordinary
courage and wisdom demonstrated by the diver, Fuhito proclaims: “She is no
ordinary human. Doubtless, she will be reborn as the Dragon Princess!” The tenrākṣasī ladies led by the bodhisattva Samantabhadra (Fugen jūrasetsunyo), who
are saviors for lay female Buddhist practitioners, appear at the site, thereby confirming that Fuhito’s foretelling will be realized.16 The Sanshū shido dōjō engi
also states that Fuhito was then able to deliver the Jewel That Never Turns Away
15. The Sanshū shido dōjō engi forms a pair with Misogi no engi 御衣木之縁起 , a story of adivine log that drifts for a long time in the sea before reaching the rocky beach at Shido Bay. It
relates a story of a nun who brings the log to her convent and with the help of a heavenly boy
carves the log into an image of an eleven-headed Kannon. The image is enshrined in a hall thatwas to be known later as Shido Temple; see Wada (1967, 45–51).
16. For lay women and the worship of the jūrasetsunyo, see Mukasa (2009) and FabricandPerson (2001).

48 | Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 42/1 (2015)
to Kōfukuji, where it was enshrined in the forehead of the principal image of the
Buddha (Wada 1967, 61–64).
In the play Ama, the village woman now addresses herself to Fusazaki andinforms him that because of the diver’s sacrifice and contract with Fuhito, “youbecame a court minister, and you were named Fusazaki, the name of this very
shore. And why should I hide it now? I am the ghost of the diver, your mother”(Nishino 1998, 578). The morning is breaking now. The ghost who came as anight’s dream bids Fusazaki farewell, leaves him a letter, and disappears amidst
the ocean waves. This concludes the first act of the noh drama. During the interlude, Fusazaki has his retainers order the villagers to abstain from using nets
and catching fish for seven days and prepare a ceremony of music to comfort his
mother in her afterlife.
At the opening of the second act, Fusazaki reads the letter his mother’s ghost
left for him: “For thirteen years my body was buried in white sand, my road ofdeath, darker than night. Yet I have no one who prays for my repose and peace.
My son, show me your filial love and help me out of the darkness! It has indeed
been thirteen years since then.”17 Immediately answering his mother’s plea,
Fusazaki offers copies of the Lotus Sutra to Shido Temple together with othergifts. There he founds the annual Hokke hakkō, the lectures and recitation of the
Lotus Sutra in eight volumes, and commemorates his mother in the thirteenth
year after her passage into the darkness.
As soon as the voices chanting the sutra are heard, Fusazaki’s mother, now
reborn as the Dragon Princess and holding a Lotus Sutra scroll in her hand,enters the stage. When she speaks, the noh drama makes it clear that Fuhito’s
prophecy has come true: “O how grateful I am to your service for my repose!
Guided by this sutra, even Devadatta, the transgressor of the five cardinal sins,
received the Buddha’s prophecy of his rising as Tathāgata Heavenly King, and theeight-year-old Dragon Princess was reborn in the Spotless World in the south.
O please go on, go on chanting the sutra!” (Nishino 1998, 579). The Dragon
Princess now opens the Lotus Sutra scroll and joins the chanters in reading the“Devadatta” chapter. When she finishes, she hands the scroll to Fusazaki. Ama
ends with the following proclamation by the Dragon Princess:Thanks to this sutra’s virtuous power (tokuriki 徳力) of saving beings, thanks
to its virtuous power, all the eight tribes of devas and dragons, all the humans
and nonhumans alike, from far away in the Buddha’s assembly [on Eagle Peak]witnessed the Dragon Princess reach Buddhahood. As wonderful as that is at
this Shido Temple in Sanuki Province, the Buddha Dharma thrives now! The
temple’s celebrated annual Eight Lectures on the Lotus, as well as devout ser17. The diver’s line here in the Ama faithfully paraphrases the corresponding passage from theSanshū shido dōjō engi; see Wada (1967, 63); Nishino (1998, 579).

abé: the dragon princess | 49
vices every morning and evening, mark this temple as a holy site. These are all(Nishino 1998, 579–80)
made possible by a son’s filial devotion.

It is the relationship between the jewel, on the one hand, and the Dragon
Princess and her former life as the diver, on the other, that forms the central
strand of the narrative of Ama. The Jewel That Never Turns Away is an excellent metaphor that represents the power of the ekayāna teaching of the Lotus
Sutra. As demonstrated by the celebrated parable of the burning house, the sutra
claims that it enables all beings to reach Buddhahood, whether they practice
the path of the bodhisattva, the arhat, or the pratyekabuddha (T 9.12b–13c). The
jewel, which enables viewers from any direction to see the Buddha in the middle
looking back right at them, visually translates the sutra’s power of saving beingsof all different capabilities.
In that sense, Ama can be read as a story of the transmission from China toJapan of the Lotus Sutra’s salvific power, symbolized by the jewel. The story suggests that the Buddha image at Kōfukuji was not complete until the jewel wasinserted into its forehead. Only then was the image recognized for its efficacy insaving living beings. What made this transmission possible was, of course, thediver. Her unusual courage and self-sacrifice for the sake of her child empowered her to bring the jewel back from the dragons’ abyss to the human realm.
The Lotus Sutra emphasizes through and through the employment of expedientmeans as the principal mode of manifesting its “virtuous saving power.” As demonstrated by the celebrated parables of the burning house, the wealthy man andhis lost son, and the skillful physician and his poisoned children, the relationship between the giver and receivers of the expedient means, the Buddha and his
disciples, is depicted metaphorically throughout the sutra as that of a father andhis children (T 9.12b–13c, 16b–17c, 43a–b).18
That relationship is replaced by the mother-son interaction in Ama. The diver’s death and descent into the darkness of the netherworld can therefore be seen
as expedient means for awakening Fusazaki to devotional deeds. She is the agent
that moves Fusazaki to offer the sutra to Shido Temple and provide a generous
donation so that the temple can develop into a powerful holy site and center for
the worship of the Lotus Sutra. That is to say, the diver-Dragon Princess personifies the virtuous saving power of the sutra in the drama; hence, her character isintrinsically linked to the jewel, which symbolizes the same power. Her physicaloneness with the jewel caused her death but at the same time sends her on to
her next transmigratory journey, in which she becomes the great bodhisattva
Dragon Princess. Therefore, when she hands the Lotus Sutra scroll to Fusazaki, it
18. For the significance of expedient means and its relationship to ideas of the ekayāna andthe Buddha’s eternal life as they are expressed in the Lotus Sutra, see Bielefeldt (2009) and
Masuda (1971).

50 | Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 42/1 (2015)
represents the most legitimate transmission of the sutra’s teaching imaginable: atransmission from a divinity in the Lotus Sutra to a human who implements her
power to make Shido Temple flourish. Precisely because of that transmission,
Ama depicts the Dragon Princess as far more efficacious in her agency than the
Buddha image at Kōfukuji, which only passively receives the jewel.
The diver’s rebirth as the Dragon Princess is central to her characterization.
It does not make sense logically that the Nara-period Japanese diver is reborn
as the Dragon Princess, who in the sutra is a contemporary of Śākyamuni Buddha. However, the diver’s great self-sacrifice could be imagined fictionally as
one of the memorable bodhisattva acts that the Dragon Princess may have performed in one of her numerous past existences. The Lotus Sutra’s narrative has
nothing to say about the Dragon Princess’ former lives, the long night of hertransmigratory journey before she establishes herself as a bodhisattva. It is thatdarkness into which the authors of the noh drama released their imaginationin creating the character of the diver. In the sutra, the Buddha compassionately
guides his disciples by evoking the memory of their past lives and turns his own
extinction into the ultimate skillful means to guide them further. Likewise, in
her ghost form the diver makes her son recover his lost memory of her sacrifice,and empowers him to become a great benefactor of the dharma of the Lotus
Sutra in Japan. It is by means of this metaphorical affinity between the diver andthe Buddha that the noh drama Ama succeeds in glorifying and eternalizing the
Dragon Princess.
Importantly, the drama treats the Dragon Princess, who embodies the deliverance of Fusazaki’s mother, as a divinity who possesses her own finality. She is
not a transitory figure who needs to abandon her body or transform into another
body, even if it is a Buddha’s. On the contrary, the female-to-female transformation of the diver-Dragon Princess underscores her potency as the agent whorouses Fusazaki to devotion and patronage. It is his mother’s self-sacrifice thatmoves Fusazaki, a sacrifice his crafty father Fuhito would never be able to make.
To conclude, Ama depicts the Dragon Princess as comparable in skill to the
Lotus Sutra’s Buddha in employing expedient means. This resonates harmoniously with the gist of the Dragon Princess episode, according to which, despite
her appearance as a nonhuman female child, she is genuinely enlightened andas qualified as the Buddha to save beings. In contradistinction to the crude andvulgar reading of the Dragon Princess episode advanced by proponents of thehenjō nanshi-ryūnyo jōbutsu theory, the creators of Ama performed a refinedreading of the episode that accords with seminal Chinese commentaries. Ama
also urges readers of the Lotus Sutra to pay closer attention to the princess’ legitimizing relationship to the jewel. All these elements give insight into the way inwhich the Dragon Princess is represented in the Heike nōkyō frontispiece, a reinterpretation of which will be given in the last section of this article.

abé: the dragon princess | 51

The Dragon Princess, Benzaiten, and the Itsukushima no honji
The female protagonist’s ordeal, suffering, death, and eventual transformation
into a divinity in the play Ama strongly resemble the structure of many honjimono, a genre of medieval ballad dramas that relate the former life stories of
local deities. In this sense, the Itsukushima no honji (Original form of the goddess of Itsukushima) is particularly interesting because it makes it possible tolook into the origin stories concerning the birth of the goddess Benzaiten (Ch.
Biancaitian 辯才天; Sk. Sarasvatī) of Itsukushima in relation to the episode of the
Dragon Princess in the Lotus Sutra.
Together with Chikubushima 竹生島 in Lake Biwa and Enoshima 江ノ島 in
Kamakura, Itsukushima Shrine on the island of Miyajima 宮島 in Hiroshima
Prefecture has long been known as one of the three principal waterfront holysites for the worship of Benzaiten, the goddess of eloquence, art, and wealth.
What makes her worship at Itsukushima distinct is that since the early medieval
period, the Itsukushima Goddess has been understood as a younger sister of the
Dragon Princess in the Lotus Sutra. As Tanaka Takako has pointed out, the celebrated Tendai Abbot Jien 慈円 (1155–1225) states in his Gukanshō 愚管抄: “The
Itsukushima goddess in question has been recounted as a daughter of the Dragon
King” (Tanaka 1993, 36; for original text, see Okami and Akamatsu 1967, 265).
The Jitokushū, a fourteenth-century compendium of the traditions of Onjōji 園城寺, carries a record of a question-and-answer session on Itukushima: “Question:
Who is the principal form of the deity [at Ituskushima]? Answer: The divine
revelation by the Itsukushima divinity in Aki Province has said, ‘I am a princessof the Dragon King Sāgara. My older sister, at the time of the ‘Devadatta’ chapter,
attained instantaneous Buddhahood’” (Jitokushū, 18b). The Daigoji shin’yōroku
provides a slightly different interpretation, in which the Itsukushima divinity is
the eldest daughter of the Dragon King: “It is said in the divine revelation by
the deity of the first-rank shrine in Aki Province, ‘I am the first daughter of the
Dragon King Sāgara. During the Buddha’s time, my sister, the second daughter,was eight years old when she received Bodhisattva Mañjuśrī’s teaching and left
for a residence elsewhere. The third daughter, my other sister [that is, Shōryū
Gongen 清滝権現], resides on Daigo Mountain” (Daigoji shin’yōroku 1: 88).19
One of the obvious reasons why the Itsukushima Benzaiten is imagined as the
Dragon Princess’s sister is to present her as the princess’ analog in soteriological efficacy. That is, Benzaiten is imagined in these sources as a divinity who iscomparable to the Dragon Princess in her power to save living beings. There
are other elements that make the sisterly association between the Itsukushima
19. For a detailed discussion of the primary sources that concern the sisterly relationshipbetween the Dragon Princess and the Itsukushima goddess, as well as its relationship to Japanese
mythology, see Tanaka 1986.

52 | Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 42/1 (2015)
goddess and the Dragon Princess look quite natural. On the one hand, since
the time of the Vedas, Sarasvatī was understood in Indian mythology as awater goddess in addition to being the divinity of eloquence and art (Ludvik
2001, 10–41). On the other hand, in the context of ancient Japanese myths, theItsukushima divinity is Itsukishima-no-hime-no-mikoto 伊都伎嶋姫命, one of thethree sisterly ocean goddesses who were born of Susano’o and the tutelary divinity of the Munakara clan. These goddesses, the Munakata Sanjoshin 宗像三女神,
were said to control the maritime traffic between the Yamato kingdom and the
Korean kingdoms (Hirafuji 1998). The combination of these two elements gave
rise to yet another Japanese form of Sarasvatī: the serpent-bodied Uga-Benzaiten
宇賀辯才天 (Yamamoto 1998, 326; Ludvik 2001, 287–91), whose physical form
recalls that of the Dragon Princess.
The Itsukushima no honji, one of the oldest among the honjimono genre,
recounts the story of Princess Ashibiki 足引宮 of a western Indian kingdom.20
King Senzai 千才王・善哉王, who rules a powerful nation in eastern India, one
day looks at an image of Lakṣmī (Jp. Kisshōten 吉祥天) painted on a jeweled fan,and helplessly falls in love with her. A minster informs him of Princess Ashibiki,
who is renowned as Lakṣmī-on-earth due to her exceptional beauty. Senzai seeks
to marry Ashibiki, but as soon as she arrives at his court, she becomes the objectof jealousy and hostility on the part of the consorts of Senzai’s father. When Senzai leaves on an expedition, these women wrongly accuse Ashibiki, who is now
pregnant, of having an affair and have her beheaded in the mountains. Ashibiki
gives birth just before she is executed, but her body lives on and feeds the infantchild until a holy man saves the child and raises him. When Senzai returns to
his court, he looks for Ashibiki in the mountains but only finds her remains;
however, thanks to the holy man’s help, he meets his son. Senzai becomes theholy man’s disciple and practices austerities. When he completes his training,
the holy man teaches him a magical ritual that revives Ashibiki. The holy manthen throws two swords into the sky, and they fly away to lands where Senzai,
Ashibiki, and their child will find happiness.
The couple and their child find the first sword in an island kingdom, but
Senzai falls in love with another princess there. Abandoned by her husband,
Ashibiki boards an empty boat and conceals herself alone in a cabin. After a longtime drifting in the ocean, the boat arrives at the shore of Itsukushima, where
20. There are two main variations within the extant manuscripts of Itsukushima no honji.
This article bases itself on the Keiō University Library manuscript, which is regarded as retaining
the oldest form of the ballad drama. For the annotated text of this manuscript, see Itsukushima
no honji 1974. For the annotated text of the other, later variation, as represented by the National
Diet Library manuscript, see Nosaka (2002, 452–77). For an analysis of the texts of the Itsukushima no honji, as well as academic literature on the ballad drama and the analysis of its general
narrative pattern, see Shiraishi (1976), and Matsumoto (2002).

figure 2. Heike nōkyō container box (above) and the gorintō
and a pair of dragons on the lid (below) (Itsukushima Shrine).

54 | Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 42/1 (2015)
the holy man’s second arrow had landed. Ashibiki emerges from the boat, and assoon as she receives worship from the villagers, she is reborn as Benzaiten.
Although there is no direct mention of the Dragon Princess in the Itsukushima no honji, the ballad drama makes important references to the “Devadatta”
chapter of the Lotus Sutra (Tanaka 1993, 34–38). For example, when Princess
Ashibiki is falsely accused by the consorts and captured by her executioner, sheholds the fifth volume of the Lotus Sutra, which, as explained earlier, begins withthe “Devadatta” chapter, as a charm in her left hand. More importantly, after
she revives, her husband devotes himself to the holy man in the mountains. To
express his gratitude that Ashibiki has been brought back to life, “he collects
firewood, harvests wild fruits, scoops stream water, and prepares meals” (Itsukushima no honji, 289b–290a), just as, according to the Lotus Sutra, the Buddha
served Devadatta in a former life (T no. 262, 9.34c). In this manner the Itsukushima no honji characterizes King Senzai as comparable to the Buddha.
Ashibiki’s implied connections to the Dragon Princess are established when
she departs to Aki Province and attains her final transformation into Benzaiten
after her betrayal by Senzai. That is, Ashibiki needs to establish her independence from her husband before she attains divine status. Similarly, in the Lotus
Sutra, the Dragon Princess’s disappearance from the Buddha’s assembly on Eagle
Peak and her manifestation in a Buddha’s body in the far-off Spotless World
demonstrate that she is spiritually so advanced that she does not even need theBuddha’s assistance. In contrast, other stories in the sutra depicting disciples’
attainment of Buddhahood unfold only through prophecies of distant futures.
Itsukushima no honji also resonates with Ama, where the diver has to face
many ordeals before she is reborn as the Dragon Princess. She realizes that her
husband is merely using her to regain the jewel; she travels to the abysmal realm
to recapture it from the underwater palace; she dies in order to complete the mission; and she is forced to separate herself from her infant child, for whom she
has sacrificed her life. Similarly, Princess Ashibiki undergoes a number of trials
before emerging as Benzaiten at Itsukushima: she is unjustly killed; though she
must leave behind her infant child, her body lives on to feed him; she is revived
by the holy man only to face a betrayal by her husband; and she then travels byherself to a far-away realm. And, just like the diver in Ama, by means of femaleto-female transformation at the end of her journey, Ashibiki establishes her independence as a crucial step in realizing her own divinity at Itsukushima.
Such parallelism in their former life experiences suggests that the sisterly
association between the Itsukushima goddess and the Dragon Princess developed as a way to illustrate that devotion to the local goddess, and worship ofthe Lotus Sutra, are compatible and complementary. Because the Dragon Princess personifies the efficacy of the sutra’s salvific power, positioning the oceanic
Itsukushima Benzaiten as her sister is a legitimating gesture. In addition, both

figure 3. Scroll twelve and two other scrolls
from the Heike nōkyō (note gorintō roller
finials, left), and the cover illustration andglass title plate of scroll twelve (below)(Itsukushima Shrine).

56 | Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 42/1 (2015)
figures are known for their unusual eloquence. In fact, just like Shido Temple,
Itsukushima Shrine was an important cultic center for the worship of the Lotus
Sutra, as exemplified by Taira no Kiyomori’s offering of the Heike nōkyō, towhich this article now turns.
Rereading the Dragon Princess in the Heike nōkyō Frontispiece
In the ninth month of the second year of the Chōkan 長寛 era (1164), Taira no
Kiyomori 平清盛 (1118–1181) and the leaders of his Heike clan made an offeringto Itsukushima Shrine of a thirty-two-scroll set of lavishly decorated Buddhist
sutras that have gained fame as the Heike nōkyō 平家納経. This set consists of
the Lotus Sutra (twenty-eight scrolls), the Sutra of Immeasurable Meaning (onescroll), the Sutra of Meditation on the Bodhisattva Samantabhadra (one scroll),
the Amitābha Sutra (one scroll), and the Heart Sutra (one scroll). Accompanying these is yet another scroll that contains Kiyomori’s vow or ganmon 願文(Komatsu 2005a, 6–9; Kameda 1979, 34–35). At age forty-seven, Kiyomori wasrising rapidly in prominence, moving from his initial status as a military noble
to senior aristocrat, and eventually de facto ruler of Japan. In his vow, Kiyomori
expresses his gratitude for his clan’s phenomenal rise to prosperity and asks thetutelary divinities enshrined at Itsukushima (or “Itsukishima” 伊都伎嶋 as it was
known in his day) for continued protection in this world and for peaceful repose
in the next. Written with his own brush, the text of Kiyomori’s vow grounds
itself in a deep understanding of both exoteric and esoteric traditions of Buddhism and employs refined rhetoric in describing the relationship between the
Buddhist and native Japanese divinities (Komatsu 2005a, 6–9; 2005b, 115).
Kiyomori involved himself deeply in the whole project of the Heike nōkyō—design, copying of the text, other aspects of material production, and the manner of offering the sutras to the shrine (Kameda 1979, 31; Komatsu 2005b,
15–27). The exceptionally sumptuous and exquisite sutra scrolls result from asophisticated combination of knowledge of Buddhism and the court culture ofcalligraphy, painting, text decoration, and poetry. As Heather Blair has shown,in the larger context of Kiyomori’s investment in creating new religious rituals
at Itsukushima, these sutra scrolls exude his political intention to show that his
Taira clan had now established itself as a legitimate inheritor of the Heian court
culture, both in its religiosity, aesthetics, and poetics (Blair 2013, 22–23). In thissense, Benzaiten, the goddess of eloquence, art, good fortune, and wealth, wasthe perfect tutelary divinity for Kiyomori and his clan.
With the exception of the Heart Sutra, which is written in gold ink on deep
indigo paper, all the scrolls open with multicolor frontispiece illustrations in the
yamato-e 大和絵 style; these capture major motifs in the scriptural narratives.
The twenty-eight Lotus Sutra scrolls correspond to the twenty-eight chapters inabé: the dragon princess | 57

figure 4. The Dragon Princess offers the jewel to the Buddha. Detail fromthe frontispiece for scroll twelve of the Heike nōkyō (Itsukushima Shrine).

Kumārajīva’s translation. Although in his vow Kiyomori only mentions the
Heike clan’s male leaders as being in charge of the production of the Heike nōkyō,the frontispieces in scrolls one (“Introduction”), thirteen (“Encouragement of
Devotion”), fifteen (“Emergence from the Earth”), seventeen (“Distinguishing
Merits”), twenty-three (“Medicine King”), and twenty-seven (“Glorious King”)
all feature women, both nuns and court ladies. The Dragon Princess, whois depicted in the frontispiece in scroll twelve (see figure 1), the “Devadatta”
chapter, should be understood in relation to these other female figures, whoshowcase the visual doubling of female characters in the scriptural narratives
and female members of the Heike clan who devoted themselves to the worship of the sutra (Komatsu 2005a, 12, 42, 48, 52, 66, 74).21 These images suggest
significant involvement in the Heike nōkyō by female clan members, especially
Kiyomori’s wife, Taira no Tokiko 平 時子(1126–1185), and her sister Shigeko 滋子
21. For an analysis of the frontispiece in scroll twenty-three, see Eubanks (2009, 223). Also
see Tanabe (1988).

58 | Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 42/1 (2015)(also known as Kenshunmon’in 建春門院, 1142–1176), who happened to be theRetired Sovereign Goshirakawa’s consort.22
As discussed in the previous section, the principal divinity of Itsukushima
Shrine is Benzaiten, who had been integrated into the native Japanese pantheonof gods. She was worshipped as a local manifestation of both Eleven-Headed
Avalokiteśvara (Jp. Jūichimen Kannon 十一面観音), and Mahāvairocana (Jp.
Dainichi nyorai 大日如来) (Kubota 2002). Because the Benzaiten enshrined at
Itsukushima was understood as a younger sister of the Dragon Princess in the
Lotus Sutra, Itsukushima Shrine was imagined as the “Dragon King’s Palace inour human world” (utsusomi no ryūgū うつそみの龍宮).23 In the same manner,because dragon kings are depicted in Buddhist scriptural literature as powerfulprotectors of the dharma, Itsukushima Shrine was also understood as a major
guardian institution of Buddhism in Japan. By building up Itsukushima andsponsoring extravagant ritual ceremonies there, Kiyomori intended to position
himself as the chief benefactor of the Dharma in the realm, a position that had
been reserved for emperors and retired emperors (Blair 2013, 38).
All of these religious elements are integrated within the overall design of the
Heike nōkyō, which emphasizes homage to Avalokiteśvara and Mahāvairocana,the original grounds or Buddhist forms of the Itsukushima goddess. The thirtythree Heike nōkyō scrolls numerically match the thirty-three different ways inwhich, according to the Lotus Sutra, the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara manifests
herself to save living beings (T 9.57a–b). Furthermore, the splendid three-story
black bronze container (the Heike nōkyō nōchi 平家納経納置) produced bothto offer and to preserve the scrolls is extremely important because it visually
expresses how the Heike conceptualized their offering. The box’s elaborate lid
features a pair of dragons protecting a five-ring stupa (gorintō 五輪塔), which
symbolizes Mahāvairocana, while flying dragons carrying cintāmaṇi jewels decorate all four sides of the box (see figure 2).
With this in mind, it seems that scroll twelve, the “Devadatta” chapter, musthave received special attention (see figure 3). Together with its frontispiece,
which captures the moment of the Dragon Princess’s offering of her jewel to the
Buddha, the decorative elements of this scroll echo the central design motifs
expressed in the sutra container box (Harada 2005; Kajitani 2005). The orna22. Tokiko, Shigeko, and Kiyoko 清子, Tokiko’s daughter and Taira no Munemori’s 平 宗盛
wife, are particularly renowned for their avid worship of the Itsukushima divinities and areconsidered to have taken an active role in the production of the Heike nōkyō (Komatsu 2005a,
99–102).
23. See “Sahyōe no kami Fujiwara no Shigenori no shojō” 左兵衛督藤原成範書状 , cited asa document from the Itsukushima monjo 厳島文書 in Komatsu (2005a, 100). Shigenori (alsoknown as Narinori, 1134–1187) was Kiyomori’s son-in-law.

abé: the dragon princess | 59

mental crystal pieces (jikushu 軸首) attached to either end of the roller take theform of gorintō, replicating the principal image on the sutra box. The scroll’scover illustration shows monstrous sea creatures that are suggestive of the
Dragon King Sāgara, the Dragon Princess, and their retinue in their underwaterpalace. Whereas other scrolls have small silver plates on their cover sheets withthe titles of the chapters embossed or carved in Chinese characters, scroll twelve
has a special title plate made of dark blue glass, again suggestive of the dragons’
abysmal realm.
All these considerations make it clear that the sisterly affiliation between the
Benzaiten of Itsukushima and the Dragon Princess in the Lotus Sutra made the“Devadatta” chapter particularly important to the Heike clan’s offering to Itsukushima Shrine. What made them choose the scene of the Dragon Princess’ offering of the jewel to represent the “Devadatta” chapter on its frontispiece?
Kajitani Ryōji has suggested that Kiyomori timed the offering of these decorated scriptures in 1164 because his and Tokiko’s daughter Tokuko 徳子 (alsoknown as Kenreimon’in 建礼門院, 1155–1214) was then about the same age as
the Dragon Princess in the Lotus Sutra (Kajitani 2005, 257). Kajitani has also
argued that the image reflects Kiyomori’s wish for his daughter to grow up into
the “jewel lady” (gyokujo 玉女), the wise, virtuous, and beautiful queen of Buddhist mythology who legitimates her husband as a cakravartin, a virtuous monarch who rules by the power of the Dharma (tenrin shōō 転輪聖王).24 Kajitani’s
point makes sense because in Shōan 2 (1172) Tokuko married Emperor Takakura
高倉天皇 (r. 1168–1180), thereby increasing Kiyomori’s political influence. Tokuko’s wedding robe was donated to Itsukushima as an offering in order to celebrate this auspicious and advantageous marriage. As the queen mother of thecrown prince Tokihito 言仁親王 (later Emperor Antoku 安徳天皇, 1178–1185) she
solidified the power of Kiyomori and his clan members (Gomi 1999, 172, 216–18,
254). At the time of the offering of the Heike nōkyō in 1162, Kiyomori must haveexpected his daughter to play a significant political role for his clan in the notso-distant future.
Historical context thus suggests that the Heike men and women who participated in the production of the Heike nōkyō chose the image of the eight-year-old
Dragon Princess for scroll twelve’s frontispiece because it evoked—and therefore
united—both the Itsukushima goddess and Tokuko (see figure 1 and figure 4).
The image extols the potent power of Itsukushima’s Benzaiten as the Dragon Princess’s sister and at the same time expresses the Heike clan’s hope that Tokuko would
be protected and empowered by the goddess. It is difficult to imagine that the Taira
had any interest in either Tokuko’s transformation into a male practitioner or her
24. For the gyokujo as one of the cakravartin’s seven regalia and how she was imagined by the
Tendai Abbot Jien in relationship to the Japanese emperor, see Abé (1999, 331, 363).

60 | Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 42/1 (2015)
attainment of the male body of a Buddha; indeed, the design of the frontispiecehas nothing to do with these.25 In other words, the henjō nanshi-ryūnyo jōbutsu
theory does nothing to explain the image and its implications.26
With her delicate court robe and flying scarf, a royal diadem adorning herhair and two court attendants accompanying her, the frontispiece places a particular emphasis on the Dragon Princess’s regal qualities. She is no ordinary girl,but the princess who represents the dragon race—just as Tokuko represented
the Heike clan.27 In the sutra, the princess offers the jewel to the Buddha on thesummit of Eagle Peak. In the frontispiece, however, she stands on the waves,
making it look as if she has freshly emerged from the ocean. This is suggestiveof her freedom in swimming through the bitter sea of samsara and rising aboveit through her unparalleled enlightenment; simultaneously, it is evocative of her
oceanic sister divinity, the Benzaiten of Itsukushima.
The placement on the topside of the frontispiece of the Buddha to whom the
Dragon Princess is offering the jewel makes it clear that he is Śākyamuni Buddha
on Eagle Peak. However, he is not depicted in the standard way, that is, against
a background showing a mountain shaped like an eagle’s head. Instead the Buddha is residing in a palace in a pure land with musical instruments flying over thesky (figure 1). This must be an attempt to demonstrate visually that Śākyamuni
Buddha in the Lotus Sutra is the Buddha of Eternal Life (Ch. jiuyuan shicheng;
Jp. kuon jitsujō 久遠実成), who declares his identity with all the Buddhas of all
Buddha lands in the past, present, and future, and ten directions in the universe.
This image of the Dragon Princess carrying the jewel also makes sense
against the historical backdrop of the Heike’s offering of the decorated scriptures. The most precious jewel, the cintāmaṇi gem, had been recognized in
Buddhist literature as one of the most important regalia of the cakravartin. The
25. This point becomes even more obvious when one compares the frontispiece in question
to the Hokke mandara 法華曼荼羅 at Honpōji 本法寺 in Toyama Prefecture. One of the illustrations for the “Devadatta” chapter in this fourteenth-century set of illustrations of the Lotus Sutra
specifically shows the process of the Dragon Princess’ sex change. Haraguchi Shizuko has demonstrated that the image was produced in relationship to a specific group of monks in attempts
to advance their henjō nannshi-ryūnyo jōbutu theory (Haraguchi 2014, 36–42, note 4).
26. Some studies of the scroll twelve frontispiece have suggested that the image is a visualexpression of Buddhism’s ambivalence toward women’s salvation or is nothing other than aclever avoidance of the issue of transformation into a male (for example, Moerman 2005, 191,
239; Meeks 2010, 69–72, 307). Despite differences in opinion, these studies have approached theimage with a presupposition that because the frontispiece features the Dragon Princess it musthave to do with henjō nannshi, ryūnyo jōbutsu, or both. My point here is simply that the painting
is about what it depicts, that is, the Dragon Princess’ offering of the jewel, and has nothing to dowith other vignettes in the scriptural episode.
27. I am indebted to Melissa McCormick for her assistance in reading the image of the
Dragon Princess in the frontispiece.

abé: the dragon princess | 61

cintāmaṇi, together with the jewel lady, is also among the seven attributes of the
Buddha Eka-uṣṇīṣacakra (Jp. Ichiji chōrinnō 一字頂輪王 or Ichiji kinrin 一字金輪), who simultaneously personifies Mahāvairocana and the cakravartin (Abé1999, 266–69, 353–55, 364). The frontispiece scene therefore doubly serves as an
expression of the Heike clan’s hope that Tokuko would be the future legitimizerof the Japanese emperor’s rule, and likewise that with the tutelage of the Itsukushima goddess, their clan could play a key role in supporting the imperial houseand controlling the imperium.
As discussed in the preceding analysis of Ama, in the Lotus Sutra the jewel
symbolizes the sutra’s salvific power as the Buddha’s ultimate teaching. As avisual metaphor, then, the image of an eight-year-old girl offering the most precious jewel to the Buddha extols the Itsukushima goddess as the Dragon Princess’sister while also suggesting the Heike’s devotion to the goddess, her shrine, theLotus Sutra, and Buddhism. This explains why the design motifs of this particular scroll—the cover illustration, title plate, finials, and frontispiece—resonate sowell with the Heike nōkyō container. Together, these are excellent material andvisual examples of the way in which the Heike clan skillfully integrated into theirworship the combined practice of esoteric and Exoteric Buddhism (kenmitsusōshū 顕密双修), setting the standard for the religious engagements of Heian
courtiers, both lay and ordained.28
In turn, the frontispiece can be read as a special type of engi-e or etoki, which
may be termed “a ciphered origin story self-portrait.” Having the Heike clan
itself as a narrator, and through the metaphorical qualities of the Dragon Princess, it tells a story of how the patronage of the Heike clan transformed Itsukushima from a provincial shrine into a major cultic center and how the tutelage of
the Itsukushima Goddess brought eminence to the clan.
There is one remaining question: does the scene of the Dragon Princess offering her jewel to the Buddha indeed capture the essence of the “Devadatta” chapter? In the episode discussed in the first half of this article, Mañjuśrī speaks of
the Dragon Princess as the most advanced bodhisattva among his dragon disciples. Then, when she suddenly appears before the Buddha and his assembly on
Eagle Peak, she bows before the Buddha’s feet and praises him with her gāthā,for which the last four lines run:
Having heard [the Lotus Teaching], I realized the Bodhi
To which the Buddha alone should be able to bear witness
May I spread the Great Vehicle
And save beings from their suffering!
		

又聞成菩提
唯佛當證知
我闡大乗教
度脱苦衆生

(T 9.35b–c)

28. For another example of representations of kenmitsu Buddhism in visual art the late Heianperiod, see Abé (2014).

62 | Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 42/1 (2015)
These lines deserve particular attention as the Dragon Princess’ proclamation of her vow. They make it clear that, as we have already seen, her ultimate
goal is to employ the Lotus Sutra, the most advanced Mahayana teaching,to save living beings. Zhiyi, Jizang, and Kuiji all point out in their commentaries that the Dragon Princess is unique among the characters of the Lotus
Sutra because unlike the Buddha’s other disciples, she did not have the chance
to study the ekayāna teaching directly from him on Eagle Peak (T no. 1721,
34.463a–b, 591b; no. 1723, 34.659b-660 and 34.815a–816c; see, for example, T no.
262, 9.115a–117a). Despite this apparent disadvantage, according to her teacher
Mañjuśrī, the Dragon Princess has reached unsurpassed perfect enlightenment(mujō tōshōgaku 無上等正覚), none other than enlightenment as attained by the
Buddhas. Therefore, when she appears at the Buddha’s assembly, it is particularly important that she receives the Buddha’s own authentication of her Bodhi.
With his approval, she is now ready to teach the Lotus Sutra and save beings.
When she proffers her legendary jewel, which as we have seen represents thesaving power of the sutra, to the Buddha, he immediately accepts it, much as anexpert gemologist is able to effortlessly ascertain a stone to be genuine. In the
more general context of Mahayana scriptures, jewels serve as metaphors for theperfection of wisdom and the perfectly enlightened mind.29 Indeed, the Buddha’s acceptance of the Dragon Princess’s jewel is none other than his acknowledgment of her perfection of wisdom. Zhiyi explicates the significance of the
Dragon Princess offering the jewel to the Buddha in terms of cause (her studyof the Lotus Sutra under Mañjuśrī) and effect (her attainment of Bodhi) in her
bodhisattva practice:
Her offering of the jewel manifests the perfect understanding of the Dharma
attained by her. The round jewel indicates that she perfectly mastered thecause. Offering it to the Buddha represents her act of manifesting the effectof the cause that she gathered within herself. That the Buddha accepted thejewel swiftly means that her attainment of the effect was even faster. Thus in an
instant of thought in which she took a seat in the assembly, she demonstrated(T no. 1718, 34.117a)that she had attained Buddhahood without fail.

This passage from Zhiyi’s commentary on the Lotus Sutra (Fahua wenguo)
directly feeds into his refutation of Śāriputra’s belief in women’s inferiority,
which was examined in the second section of this article. Zhiyi observes that byaccepting the Dragon Princess’s jewel, the Buddha has authenticated her studyof the Lotus Sutra under Mañjuśrī in the Dragon King’s palace, her resulting
29. For example, for the jewel as the perfection of wisdom, see the Greater Prajñāpāramitā
Sutra, T no. 220, 6.536c, 551c, 717c, and 7.290c; and for the jewel as the perfectly enlightened
mind, see the Flower Garland Sutra, T no. 278, 9.622c.710b, 715b, 777b–c. For a general discussionof the significance of the jewel in the Mahayana tradition, see Ishii (2001), especially 118–20.

abé: the dragon princess | 63

enlightenment, and her ability to employ the sutra’s power of expedient means
to save beings. In that sense, too, she is already acknowledged as an equal of the
Buddha.
The Dragon Princess then urges Śāriputra to recognize the Buddha’s acknowledgement by asking him if the Buddha’s acceptance of her jewel was quick.
He replies to her, “It was swift indeed!” And yet the episode goes on becauseŚāriputra, sadly, and perhaps pathetically too, does not understand that the Buddha’s swift receipt of the jewel has already proven wrong his own insistence on
women’s inferiority. Precisely because of his ignorance, the princess needs now
to alert him as follows: “Use your supernatural power and watch me attain Buddhahood. It will be even faster!” (T 9.35c). With this proclamation, the episodereaches its finale, wherein the Dragon Princess’s use of visual expedient means
finally silences Śāriputra.
Thus, if one reads the Dragon Princess episode from the vantage point of the
Buddha in the narrative, as did Zhiyi, the story reaches its climax at her offering of the jewel and the Buddha’s acceptance of it—the moment in the narrativethat reveals her attainment of the unexcelled enlightenment and salvific power.
However dramatic her transformation into a male and her instant attainmentof the Buddha’s body may appear, they simply explain her exceptional spiritual
accomplishment to those who had been unable to comprehend it.
Those responsible for production of the Heike nōkyō must have selected thescene of the Dragon Princess offering the jewel due to their thorough grasp of
the “Devadatta” chapter, which they read in a manner paralleling the sophisticated interpretations of Zhiyi, Jizang, and Kuiji. Even more impressively, theygrounded themselves in such a profound knowledge of the poetics and rhetoricof the sutra that they designed the Devadatta scroll as a whole—its cover illustration, title plate, and scroll finials—so as to present the image of the Dragon
Princess in the frontispiece as a sophisticated visual metaphor. Precisely because
they aptly selected the climax of the chapter, where the Dragon Princess’s innerenlightenment is revealed, the image of her offering of the jewel is empowering,at once evoking their devotion to the Itsukushima goddess and expressing theirprayer for Tokuko’s success as an elite courtier.
Conclusion
It is hoped that this article has raised a few intriguing issues that deserve further
consideration in the study of engi literature. First, it supports a new approach that
understands medieval Japanese engi as a capacious and fluid genre integrative of
diverse subgenres, such as fiction, drama, poetry, myths, visual culture, and historical documents. Second, it proposes to isolate this sense of the word engi fromthe philosophical idea of dependent co-origination, instead understanding the64 | Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 42/1 (2015)
word’s implications in line with the Buddhist narrative tradition, in particular,
various origin stories found in the scriptures. It therefore advocates as a productive research method a juxtaposed reading of medieval Japanese engi stories
together with other, Buddhist scriptural narratives. Third, as a case study, it has
exposed the henjō nanshi-ryūnyo jōbutsu theory as none other than a dogmaticmisrepresentation of the Dragon Princess grounded in bigotry and prejudice.
However influential it may be, that theory is simply a dreadful exegetical distortion of the Lotus Sutra. It diametrically opposes the manner in which thecharacter of the Dragon Princess is constructed in the sutra’s narrative.
Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, the foregoing discussion suggests thatmedieval Japanese Buddhist doctrinal commentaries do not necessarily hold aprivileged position in interpreting Buddhist scriptural narratives. Demonstrating how scriptural exegesis may deteriorate into bad practice, the proponents of
the henjō nanshi-ryūnyo jōbutsu theory justified their stand by isolating theseterms from the larger narrative context and treating them as if they were standalone concepts. The medieval Japanese engi materials discussed in this article doexactly the opposite. In line with conscientious exegetical practices exemplified
by seminal Chinese commentaries, they pay close attention to the manner inwhich the words in a scriptural text intertwine with each other to form narrative
strands, and then weave those strands into the poetic texture of a new text. It istherefore not surprising that the creators of medieval engi literature, as raconteurs, performed a reading of scriptural narratives superior to that of doctrinaires who were preoccupied with fabricating dogma. Engi literature therefore
has the potential to serve as an effective tool for illustrating the intricacy of narrative developments in and around Buddhist scriptures.
In the second chapter of the Lotus Sutra, the Buddha explains the discursive
uniqueness of the sutra: “I illustrate the nature of all things by means of countless expedient means and all sorts of origin stories (innen 因縁), metaphors andparables (hiyu 譬喩), and rhetoric (gonji 言辞). What I teach [in this sutra] cannot be understood by means of analyses and discriminations” (T 9.7a).30 In otherwords, the Lotus Sutra is a scriptural text that celebrates its own figurative andrhetorical qualities. It is this prioritization of the literary over the dogmatic thatinspired the creation of diverse medieval engi materials in fictional, dramatic,
and visual media.
30. In Chinese, the passage is as follows: 我以無數方便種種因縁譬喩言辭演説諸法. 是法非思
量分別之所能解. There are numerous passages that are identical or similar to this one throughout the sutra. Because the word 因縁 (Ch. yinyuan; Jp. innen) is grouped together with words formetaphors, parables, and rhetoric, and because that group in turn is contrasted with doctrinal
speculation, I understand the word 因縁 to correspond to the ideas expressed by the Sanskrit
terms nidāna, jātaka, ittivṛttaka, or avadāna in Sanskrit; therefore I have rendered it here as“origin stories.” See also the introduction to this article.

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