The Hongwanji and the Institutional History of Married Clergy

What began as Shinran's own personal and doctrinal departure from monastic celibacy became, over the centuries that followed, the formal institutional practice of the Hongwanji, the temple organization that grew into Jodo Shinshu's principal administrative body, where married clergy raising families within temple life became the ordinary and expected pattern rather than an exception explained away. Jaffe's study traces how this arrangement, which had set Jodo Shinshu apart from Japan's other Buddhist schools for centuries, became far less unusual after the Meiji government's 1872 decree permitting clerical marriage across all Buddhist schools, a change Jodo Shinshu had anticipated by six centuries under its own doctrinal reasoning rather than following from any change in state policy. Temple succession within Jodo Shinshu has continued largely as a family matter since Shinran's own lifetime, with a temple's leadership typically passing to a married priest's child rather than through the kind of independent monastic ordination line found elsewhere in Japanese Buddhism, and the school maintains no monastic precept ceremony equivalent to full ordination in other traditions; its clergy are trained and certified through the Hongwanji's own institutions rather than through the monastic vows that mark ordination in schools such as Soto or Rinzai Zen.