Symbolization of Pregnancy

Pregnancy encompassed conflicting possibilities of threat and promise to persons and institutions. It signaled the possibility of a child’s death as much as life, of institutional decline as much as prosperity, of a woman’s lapse into illness or worse as much as her healthy recovery. Further, it brought to the forefront forms of symbolization that exemplified the depth of its ambivalence, most emphatically in its embrace of life and death. A simple example is chishigo, which was a systematic, determinative notion of time meant to roughly gauge, based on a person’s birth, the length of her life. Literally meaning “knowing the time of death,” chishigo indicated the term of one’s life through divination based on the calendar and its ordering of days both through a cycle of ordinal numbers and a sexagenary cycle. Namura provides an example of chishigo.29 It cautions that giving birth on days with certain matches between both cycles risks resulting in the child’s early death. For example, giving birth on a designated day of the rat whose ordinal number also contains a one, two, nine, or zero indicates the child may die early in life.

The assumption suggested in chishigo that the shadow of death and the light of life claim equal portions of pregnancy’s meaning appears in more exemplary ways. One documented traditional element of pregnancy is the understanding that fetuses and young children are not fully human. It is only until the completion of rites of passage—typically marking the ages of three, five, and seven years and known as shichi-go-san—that the child breaks its connection to the divine realm and enters the human community as a full partner.30 Being between gods and humans places fetuses and young children in a state of liminality from where they move either forward toward the human realm or backward toward the land of kami and buddhas. Forward movement means birth and acceptance of the child into this world. Reverse movement is the result of a miscarriage, abortive techniques, infanticide, or early death by natural causes or accident that pulls the child back into the other world to wait for another birth opportunity.31

A Record of Treasures for Women offers a visual view of fetal life suggesting this kind of liminality—and much more. Inside the mother’s body, the child takes form in an environment—the womb—that is not simply a passageway from divine to human, but a field of activity locating the ultimate unity of both divine and human dimensions. From this view of the womb pregnancy exhibits not only the oft-noted diachronic move from divine to human, but also a synchronic moment of unified divine and human identity in the fetal body. The text depicts this human-divine status of fetal development through ten illustrations juxtaposing Buddhist divinities and the fetus over ten months of in-utero development. These illustrations were reprinted (with minor alterations, such as addition of a full head of hair to the fetus) with Namura’s text several times throughout the period, including Takai’s 1847 edition (figs. 9 and io). This type of pictorial genre is called “depictions of ten months in the womb” (tainai totsuki no zu). Some versions are filled with divinities while others have no sacred referents at all. Throughout the Tokugawa period all kinds of ten-month pictures were produced for any number of purposes: religious preaching, safe birth devotionalism, medical views of corporeal fetal development, and even criticism of Buddhism. In this way the genre became a canvas upon which different groups at different points in the period drew their particular concerns of religion, medicine, and social criticism. Indeed, Namura’s pregnancy chapter, and in particular its ten-month illustrations, subsumed all of these concerns throughout the middle and late Tokugawa period. This is especially apparent when we compare the original 1692 guide with Takai’s redacted version. Takai inserts an updated version of the original illustrations along with a competing set of pictures (not shown here) stripped of divinities. I return to the 1847 text later in this section, but now the older pictures need examination.

Namura's 1692 text

In Namura’s 1692 version, the fetus’ first four months of existence are represented by various ritual paraphernalia. In the fifth month the fetus finally takes human form and remains largely unchanged throughout the remaining months. In the tenth month the body turns upside down to descend from the womb. Above each monthly depiction is a picture of a corresponding Buddhist divinity. The deities form the first ten of thirteen figures that make up the esoteric pantheon. Represented in the womb illustrations from the first month to the tenth are Fudo Myoo, Shaka, Monju, Fugen, Jizo, Miroku, Yakushi, Kannon, Seishi, and Amida. As part of a larger pantheon of thirteen Buddhist deities (jusan

Figure 9 Depiction of the first five months of fetal formation and guardian buddhas. From the 1847 edition of A Record of Treasures for Women. Courtesy of Ozorasha, Tokyo.

Figure io Depiction of the latter five months of fetal formation and guardian buddhas. From the 1847 edition of A Record of Treasures for Women. Courtesy of Ozorasha, Tokyo.

Butsu), the group has symbolically centered on death and memorial rites for hundreds of years.32 Despite this connection between Buddhism and funerary culture, which by Namura’s time had blossomed ritually and institutionally, he makes no note of esoteric Buddhism, death, or enlightenment. His use of symbols, which in monastic Buddhism signified death and esoteric visions of ultimate reality, to understand pregnancy and phenomenal life is testament to the malleability of Buddhist symbolism and the popular expansion it had achieved by his time. Further, his illustrations are not unique. A Record of Treasures for Women represents a late and popular derivation of the genre. Similar illustrations, for example, were published a half century or more earlier through a story called The Original Ground of Kumano (Kumano no gohonji), which was one version of a popular medieval tale.33 As these visual precedents indicate, the symbolic overlap of death/life and ultimate/phenomenal connects Namura’s mid-Tokugawa view of pregnancy to an earlier history of Buddhist thought concerning fetal status and buddhahood. Although Namura leaves this history unarticulated, as a compiler he was aware of symbols coming from this religious current that were then available for him to use. Much of this current flowed from earlier texts like versions of the Kumano tale and an important syncretic Buddhist writing, Unity of the Three Wisdoms (Sanken itchi sho).34 This work, which I discuss below, offers an evocative description of fetal buddhahood. It likely influenced the later Kumano story, which in turn acted as a bridge for these symbols to cross into Tokugawa lifestyle guides. Namura’s illustrations and redactions represent a popular diffusion of this religious history into the wider stream of Tokugawa culture.

Two key symbolic characteristics stand out from the illustrations. First, by incorporating symbols of death memorial, pregnancy acts as the symbolic inverse of death. Second, in identifying fetal status with deities and ritual items, the text’s symbolization of pregnancy reveals two tendencies of reality construction in Japanese religious history that had reached full maturity by Namura’s time: i) to bring order to the jumbled sacred universe by creating links between the plethora of deities and between deities and human-created spaces and objects, and 2) to valorize phenomenal existence through radical identity with ultimate existence.

As for the first characteristic, the ten divinities of fetal gestation represent the same buddhas in death symbolism, where they are known as the ten kings (ju 0). Originally the kings came from China as rulers of an underworld where the souls of the dead received judgment from each of ten presiding officials. This underworld—a purgatorial system that mirrored the worldly bureaucracy of imperial China—developed around the seventh century but was not described in textual detail until the ninth-century publication of a text called Scripture on the Ten Kings (Shi wang jing). Sometime between iooo and 1300 in Japan a text influenced by Scripture on the Ten Kings was written titled The Scripture on Jizo and the Ten Kings (Jizo ju o kyo). A novel feature of this text is its pairing of the ten Chinese kings with the ten esoteric Buddhist divinities.35 This linkage of kings and buddhas derived from the kind of reality construction I mentioned earlier that seeks to create an ordered symbolic universe by establishing connections among a tumble of unrelated deities, places, and things. The most explicit example of this is honji sui-jaku, which is a combinatory paradigm typically linking particular buddhas as numinous reality (honji) with kami as the manifest traces of that reality (suijaku), which in turn was the “linchpin” of the cultic, ritual, and symbolic order of much ofJapanese religion until the Meiji period.36 By the fourteenth century the ten kings, in their Buddhist transformation, plus the additional three deities completing the pantheon of thirteen buddhas, were becoming an integral part ofJapan’s developing funerary and memorial culture as symbols of the periodic thirteen services for the dead (jusan kaiki).37

As the illustrations in Namura’s text indicate, the buddhas representing the passage into death also mirror the passage into life. As with particular junctures in death memorial, each divinity corresponds with the fetus at a particular time during gestation.38 Fudo guides the dead in the first seven days after death; he also presides over the first month of gestation. Likewise, Amida establishes identity with the soul of the dead in the third year of memorial as well as with the fetus during its last moments in the womb. Although the symbolization of birth and death mirrored one another, a caveat is necessary when considering the illustrations and the pairing of birth and death. Texts and guides aimed at women and their concerns disseminated a variety of similar fetus-Bud-dhist divinity illustrations, particularly in the first half of the Tokugawa, before latter-period developments in obstetrics and criticism of Buddhism emerged in full to alter the genre. However, the correspondence of deities with gestation never matched the cultural hold of the correspondence of deities with death memorial.39 Part of the reason for this disparity is that death ritual became the operative realm of a professional priesthood in the Tokugawa period. Although periodic memorial rites, the corresponding thirteen buddhas, and the use of memorial tablets began to achieve popularity around the fourteenth century, death and ancestor ritual was still largely a concern and practice of families. In 1640 the government required all families to register with a Buddhist temple. This in turn moved the authority of death ritual out of the house and into the temple.40 Unlike death rites, rituals of pregnancy and birth never came under the control of temple authority; they remained bound to the home throughout the Tokugawa. It was not until the late nineteenth century that Shinto gained ritual relevancy by remapping birth and other kinds of celebrations such as marriage, which family and village authority had traditionally managed, to fall within its institutional borders. Still, practices of birth, if not pregnancy, mirrored death to some extent. Most obvious are those attentive to the corporeal bodies of newborns and corpses meant to stabilize each body’s new ontological status. Examples of this are washing the newborn (ubuyu) and washing the corpse (yukan), cutting an infant’s hair (ubugezori) and tonsuring the dead (teihatsu), dressing a newborn in its first clothes (ubugi) and dressing the corpse (shinishb-zoku).41

The second symbolic characteristic of the illustrations juxtaposing the bodies of buddhas and fetus reflects onto the womb a complex background of two paradigmatic religious inclinations. One, to which I have already referred—namely the variety of ordering patterns by means of linking deities and other symbols—may be broadly considered under the rubric of honji suijaku. The other is hongaku shisb (original enlightenment thought), which is a medieval trend in Buddhism that put forward a new way of imagining the status and meaning of phenomenal life. The history of these processes of classification and imagining is too complex and significant in its own right to be reduced to the purpose of this study.42 However, in the following paragraphs I tease out some of their strands from the evocative depiction of life in the womb that is described in Unity of the Three Wisdoms.

Unity of the Three Wisdoms is not the first Japanese description of life in the womb. A very early depiction is found in Essentials of Medicine (Ishinhb), which was published in 984 and is one ofJapan’s oldest medical manuscripts.43 Tanba Yasuyori (912—995) compiled its thirty volumes from Chinese and Korean texts, and, accordingly, continental interpretative concepts become key in correlating monthly fetal gestation with development of gross anatomy and life essence. One such concept is the five operative elements (gogyb). Just as these elements interact with all patterns of change and difference in the universe, so do they act with the ten-month pattern of fetal growth. Other key conceptions include the five viscera (gozo), the six internal organs (roppu), and the notion of life force (ki). Unity of the Three Wisdoms explains the monthly formation of fetal physicality somewhat similarly to interpretations of gross bodily development in Essentials of Medicine. The former also employs concepts of the five operative elements and yin/yang to tie intercourse and conception to the patterned processes of the universe. As a product of a later time, however, a time when the spread and development of Buddhism in the medieval period had taken deep root and swelled the boundaries ofJapan’s symbolic universe, Unity of the Three Wisdoms reinterpreted the womb primarily through esoteric symbols and the paradigms of the combinatory honji suijaku and original enlightenment thought.44 By bearing hard toward esoteric symbolism and Buddhist paradigms of reality construction, it redefines the womb as a “pre-samsaric pocket universe.”45 In this new view, the fetal body not only physically develops in tune with the larger processes of a natural universe, but also spiritually develops in tune with an enlightened universe.

This view of life in the womb is part of the central theme of Unity of the Three Wisdoms, which, as the title implies and its prologue states, is to unify (itchi) the three wisdoms (sanken) of Buddhism, Shinto, and forms of divination derived from China.46 The transcendent truth of the three wisdoms is that the body of the universe and the body of each human being are profoundly tied by the same enlightened nature inherent in both. Conception and gestation, initiated through sexual union and the harmonizing of yin and yang, spark the formative experience in which the human being develops a physical body and assumes the same inherency of enlightenment marking the universe’s body.47 Birth becomes the passage into physical life, but also the gateway to realizing the enlightenment one already possesses. As part of this project the text narrates the details of monthly gestation in conjunction with the esoteric Buddhist divinities of death memorial. It conspicuously references the deities’ fixed relation with death by identifying each buddha not only with its time referent in the gestation process, but also with its time referent and order in death memorial. The text links Fudo and Shaka, for example, to the first and second months of fetal growth, respectively, while also identifying them by their positions in death memorial’s timeline, which is the first seven days (Fudo) and the second seven days (Shaka) after death.48 This overlay of time frames signals that whether moving toward or away from life, it is all on the same journey of realizing one’s inherent enlightenment in an enlightened universe. In Namu-ra’s text the explicitness of this overlay has faded. Still, the symbolic outline that Unity of the Three Wisdoms describes influenced many later depictions, from Namura’s work to latter-period texts.

Original enlightenment thought and honji suijaku formed the critical basis of this symbolic outline. Original enlightenment posits the inherent buddhahood of all phenomena: everyone and everything is enlightened as is, as born. This position collapsed tenuous but salient distinctions in Mahayana Buddhism between ultimate and phenomenal by radically valorizing the temporal world and asserting complete identity—a nondual union of enlightenment—between buddhas and all other beings constituting the universal body of buddhahood. Going where no Mahayana development had gone before, original enlightenment became, as Jacqueline Stone notes, a “new paradigm” and “reimagining” of enlightenment in medieval Japan. As Buddhism pushed deeper into Japanese symbolic and ritual life, the imaginative power of original enlightenment began coloring the wider cultural milieu, including literature and art.49 On this point, “the real engagement with Buddhism” was not through participation in monastic debates, but rather through persistent contact with symbols.50 In this fashion original enlightenment came to color other, more popular aspects of the culture, such as gestation illustrations. Further, original enlightenment thought was never systematic thought but rather a “mode” meshing “with a number of other discourses, practices, and ideas.”51 The illustrations and their monthly narrative in Unity of the Three Wisdoms portray modes of original enlightenment meshing with both the discourse of honji suijaku and ideas of pregnancy.

A conspicuous explanatory technique in the text’s view of fetal life that signals the interconnecting of honji suijaku and original enlightenment is allegoresis, or the intentional fashioning of contemporary meanings onto preexisting texts. The logic of allegoresis—extracting a preconceived interpretation from what one is interpreting—was critical to both reality constructions of combinatory linkage and radical nonduality.52 Each paradigm was highly intentional in manufacturing reality through disparate parts. Honji suijaku related unrelated deities, things, and places, and original enlightenment thought developed undeveloped logical conclusions from received Mahayana tradition. Allegoresis is particularly helpful in this type of intentional manufacturing of the unrelated and undeveloped. At its creative core is the avoidance of clashes between different kinds of symbols, texts, and ideas that history has brought together and the creation of something original by reconciling the new with the old, the foreign with the familiar, and the departure with the tradition.53

In original enlightenment the hermeneutical logic of allegoresis is termed kanjin, or “interpretation from the standpoint of the contemplation of the mind.”54 Of course, as a form of allegoresis, the interpretation has already been contemplated and assumed true, and thus the real task is to fix that truth onto a text that one is creating or reading. This fashioning of preordained truths can give the logic of allegoresis an illogical character. To observers whose interpretive assumptions fall outside the worldview and sensibility of a text built upon allegoresis, the interpretive exercise smacks of randomness. To those imbued with a sympathetic outlook, however, it opens doors filled with hidden truths that tumble forward to cover the world in meaningfulness. In Unity of the Three Wisdoms, whose outlook is imbued with a sensibility of honji suijaku and original enlightenment, allegoresis confirms a world covered in divinity that is ordered, linked, and immanent.

Toward this confirmation the author employs a type of etymological allegoresis built on the notion that ideograms possess meanings beyond those conventionally ascribed to them. One may access the true meanings they hide (i. e., fashion meanings onto them) by isolating the characters or breaking them down into smaller radicals for hermeneutical examination. The writer interprets the characters that make up the name of each monthly deity in this manner to create correspondence between the divine name and some component or principle of life. For example, the four ideograms forming the name of Fudo Myoo (the first month of gestation) break down into a number of separate characters and radicals. The author uses the two characters constituting “Myoo” to create correspondence, respectively, between “man and woman” (myd) and “father, mother, and child” (d), both of which are strongly suggestive of yin and yang associations. The ideogram representing myd combines the characters of sun and moon, and thus according to the text it means man and woman. O, which conventionally means “ruler” (it is made up of three horizontal lines representing heaven, earth, and humanity, tied together by a vertical line representing ruler), actually stands for “father, mother, and child,” according to the author’s interpretation of the three horizontal lines.55 Like sun and moon, this suggests yin and yang associations of heaven-man and earth-woman, who in their unity have sovereignty over the humanity-child they create. “Fudo” separates into fu, which typically means “negation,” but here combines the two meanings of “single” and “small” based on its character composition. The writer separates dd into two independent ideograms, one denoting heaviness and the other power or strength.56

Through the deity’s full name, the text lays out the essential figures and actions of pregnancy: a man and woman come together to become father and mother to a child by creating a single life that may indeed be small in its first month of existence but is ever gaining mass and strength. Another example of this style of interpretation comes from analysis of the name of Amida, the buddha of the tenth month. The text ties the three ideograms that make up Amida’s name to the full trajectory of human existence: birth, length of life, and death. Indeed, through the holy name, the writer asserts, one may understand that “Amida is namely one’s own body.”57 Through this type of allegoresis, Unity of the Three Wisdoms creates combinatory links between buddhas and the fetus to put forward that the constituents of life itself, from its actors (men and women, fathers and mothers, and fetuses) to its biological processes (gestation, birth, life, and death), share in the same enlightened nature of the buddhas.

In this manner of interpretation, gestation is not only associated with anatomical developments, but also with the child’s increasing sentiency and inherency of buddhahood. The fetus physically develops head and ears in the third month of Monju and develops arms and legs in the fourth month of Fugen. In the fifth month ofJizo, however, it gains the six senses of awareness; in the eighth month of Kannon it begins to hear the wisdom of the world, and by the ninth month of Seishi its hands come together in mudra and its mouth forms the holy sound a-um. At this point “the living body [of the fetus] is that of a buddha.”58 In the tenth month the body turns its head downward to emerge from the womb and into the world or, as the text describes it, 84,000 hells. This downward, plunging birth out of the womb is a complex event. It is both a “fall” from a paradisiacal environment in which enlightenment comes to inhere in the nature of human life and an entrance into a world that provides the opportunity to realize that nature.59 Given the text’s intentional overlay of death and birth, emergence from the womb is both the pathway to death as well as the necessary existential condition to realize (satoru) what one already is: a buddha in this very body (jishin zebutsu).60 Birth, life, and death—the three constituents of Amida’s name—form a continuum of phenomenal reality imbued with primordial enlightenment. The text, punctuating this with a picture of a human figure suspended upside down with hands clasped, states that this kind of birth is the origin of all buddhas (shobutsu shusshin kore nari).61

In Namura’s text explicit reference to this legacy has disappeared. What remains, though, is not insignificant: the illustrations. They were rooted in a discourse of fetal buddhahood straight from Unity of the Three Wisdoms and emerged as a distinct visual genre from popular versions of the Kumano story before authors like Namura incorporated them into lifestyle guides as the primary manner of visualizing the fetus in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The illustrations in A Record of Treasures for Women line up months, fetal development, and Buddhist divinities in a manner largely similar to its predecessors (table i). In the first four months of gestation the fetus is pictured as ritual paraphernalia: a staff (shakujd) and three different types of vajra (sho or kongd), which are handheld, pronged instruments used in esoteric Buddhist rituals.62 From the second to fourth months the vajra are one, three, and five pronged. Below each vajra appears a small face. It is the only intimation of potential human form. In the fifth month the fetus finally takes human form under the reign of Jizo. In the last month the fetus turns upside down, as originally described in Unity of the Three Wisdoms, to emerge into the world. The illustrations are divided, with buddhas on top and the fetus on the bottom. This visually captured the links to the honji suijaku and original enlightenment paradigms, but it also allowed Namura to describe the bifurcation as showing two views of the womb. One view represents medical writings (isho) and the other Buddhist writings (bussho).63 He juxtaposes similes to distinguish these views. “Like a drop of dew” is the medical phrasing to describe the fetus in the first month, and “like the shape of a staff that receives Fudo” represents Buddhist writings. “Like a peach blossom” and “like a one-pronged vajra that receives Shaka” are the respective medical and Buddhist views of the sec-

Table i Monthly Fetal Development and Correspondence with Buddhist Divinities

Ond month.64 In marking these differences Namura holds no bias against Buddhism. The bifurcation is not one of conflict between medicine and Buddhism, which was an epistemological stance that had yet to emerge in the seventeenth century, but one of complement. As he does earlier in the pregnancy chapter when noting the effects of a degenerate age on conception, Namura also puts forward here the importance of faith as part of the experiential totality of pregnancy. He assures pregnant women that if they put faith in each monthly buddha, their children will be wise and free of bodily defects.65

TAKAI'S i847 text

Namura’s acceptance of Buddhism as a soothing faith and a complementary view of gestation represents a very different attitude than that of Takai’s 1847 edition. Takai redacts an epistemological break between medicine and Buddhism by venting his disbelief about the ontological reality of the original illustrations. Their evocative power likely made them, as Namura originally suggested, objects of devotional activities for some women hoping to secure a safe pregnancy and a healthy child. However, Takai inserted into the text a strong caution against notions of wombs cluttered with ritual objects, of the human form developing from sacramental objects, and of physical bodies receiving buddhas. Along with his intellectual discomfort with buddhas in the womb, Takai also found discomfort in the foreignness of the buddhas. Foreign gods in a Japanese womb, in a Japanese body, was a problematic microcosm of the existence of foreignness—in other words, Buddhism—in the political and social body of Japan. Takai’s redactions in the birth chapter are exemplars of the nationalistic, anti-Buddhist critiques that were frothing in certain intellectual circles in the latter half of the Tokugawa.66 After acknowledging that the belief of protective womb buddhas among women is an old and still popularly entrenched custom, Takai beseeches his female audience, in a critical and nationalistic spirit, to think twice about this faith.

When you understand the reason for why things are, you will know that being pregnant with ritual objects and having humans developing from vajra and such defies reason. Again, since we are the descendants of a land of gods, it cannot be said that we receive the protection of Indian buddhas for ten months straight. No one knows how many tens of thousands of births there are in just a single day, so it goes against reason that so few buddhas, even with their supernatural powers, could be with so many people.

Moreover, if such guardian buddhas exist, then among all the Japanese there would be not one without a deep debt of gratitude. It would mean that the body of Nikko-sama (Tokugawa leyasu) as well as the bodies of your husband and parents would even possess these deities. Birth in divine Japan makes the guardianship of foreign buddhas unnecessary.67

Takai does not present this critique with words only. He also includes a second set of womb illustrations to counter the Buddhist version of the original text, although he keeps in place the older illustrations. His preferred set is devoid of divinity. The fetus is alone and develops slowly from a simple cellular-like orb in the first month to a recognizable human form in the fifth month. Looking similar in shape to a gingerbread man at this point, where Jizo used to guide the fetus into human form, it takes on more precise detail with each passing month until, by the tenth month, it actually resembles a mature toddler more than a new-born.68 Pulling from Namura’s original term “medical writings,” Takai recomm_ends that his readers put away the view of buddhas in the womb and understand their bodies solely from the perspective of contemporary medical writings.

Takai’s old and new views of the womb are evidence that the “obstetrical gaze” of the seventeenth century was multiplying in number and variety as the period went on. Further, the views moved toward greater physiological realism in the latter eighteenth century. This move was part of a larger discourse in anatomy and medical procedures that came under the purview of physicians familiar with Western modes of knowledge, typically called Dutch studies (rangaku).69 Anatomical realism in the portrayal of fetal bodies and the womb also became linked to political and economic concerns that sought to limit infanticide and abortion.70 Some interpreters have argued that this link between the science and the politics of reproduction produced in Japan initial sightings of the modern body: a distinct and corporeal entity that finally pulled away from an ancient cosmological camouflage of deities, a morally resonant universe, and the porous borders of this world and the other world.71 At the center of this shift was the Kagawa School of Obstetrics founded by Kagawa Genetsu (1700—1777). His disciples produced in 1775 a revised edition of Genetsu’s work on obstetrics, A Discourse on Birth (Sanron), first published 1765.72 The revision included realistically detailed illustrations depicting the fetus in the womb and emerging out of the mother’s body. The “realism” lies not only in what it portrays, but also in what it does not portray: religious beings. Realism here is as secular as it is anatomical. This sort of realism, which Takai’s new pictures represented, “began to supplant,” according to one interpreter, “the vague and mysterious image of a fetus symbolized by Buddhist altar fittings.”73

How fully such images of fetal and divine dimensions were supplanted, and thus how clearly the modern body came into view, is murky. An i8i2 text, Models of Various Lessons for Women (Onna zassho kydkun kagami), is notable for its ten-month view of the fetus. It removes both the child and the deities from the womb and places them in a celestial realm of clouds. In the clouds an individual kami joins each monthly buddha, and as a pair the deities guard the fetus as it physically develops. In the tenth month Amida is joined not by an anthropomorphic kami, as are the previous nine buddhas, but by a Shinto purifying wand labeled ujigami, which is the kami that traditionally functions as one’s local tutelary god and the birth god.74 This set of illustrations uses seventeenth-century visual formulations of a child’s relation with a divine dimension to express nineteenth-century issues such as an assertive, independent Shinto and the objectively anti-abortion position that the kami, particularly the ujigami, have as much claim on a fetus as its human community and on any decision that community might make. In this way, if divinized illustrations of monthly fetal development were supplanted to some degree, then to another degree they were retooled to respond to late-Tokugawa political discourses. Ancient cosmologies could still be counted on to camouflage the body in modern discourses of religious and reproductive nationalism.75

Even latter-period forms of the obstetrical gaze that were free of divinity still shared a sight line of continuity with the older gaze. Takai’s buddha-less illustrations represent this. The most obvious example of this kind of continuity is Takai’s inclusion of the traditional illustrations in the reprinted text, if only as fodder for his criticism. Also, the fifth month is still critical in marking the human resemblance of the form despite the erasure ofJizo. Another example of this continuity with the older obstetric gaze comes from the Kagawa School, which depended on a deep cultural association between the placenta and the lotus in its visual depiction of the placenta in the shape of a lotus flower. The ninth-month illustration that is representative of Namura’s original text is emblematic of this association, where there emerges from the fetus’ navel an umbilical cord-lotus stem. The stem reaches up above the child’s head, where a blooming flower droops downward, topping the head like a wide-brimmed hat. Returning briefly to Unity of the Three Wisdoms, the ninth month marks the stage when the fetus reaches a high moment of buddhahood.

Seishi, the bodhisattva of wisdom, is the reigning divinity. The lotus capping the fetus’s head—the sign of enlightenment—is powerful in its evocation, particularly given the project of original enlightenment thought to put forward the enlightenment of all phenomena. Further, the emphasis in original enlightenment on collapsing the phenomenal and ultimate signifies the lotus as marking both spiritual wisdom and biological life. The uterine lotus also alludes to the mother’s life-sustaining placenta. In Tokugawa conceptualizations of in-utero life, the placenta is routinely portrayed as a lotus blossom in a variety of depictions. A disturbing example comes from Saikaku’s novel, The Life of an Amorous Woman. His aging anti-heroine sees a horrific vision of ninety-five small figures parading outside her window. Each figure, “stained with blood from the waist down,” wears “a hat in the form of a lotus leaf.”76 The lotuses worn on the heads of these walking wounded are placentas, and the tiny figures are the fetuses the old woman has aborted during her sexual romp though life. Saikaku does not use the term “placenta” to describe the strange hats, but rather, as the translation above denotes, “lotus hats” (hasu no ha gasa).77 Saikaku trusted his readers to make the connection. So deep was this connection of the placenta-lotus that a century later the Kagawa School’s 1775 sketches, so famed for their realism, still depicted the placenta in the unmistakable shape of a lotus flower.78

All of these obstetrical gazes, from Namura’s late seventeenth-century view to Takai’s nineteenth-century one, focused on the womb and thus, obliquely, on the mother’s body. In its gaze each assumed, if differently portrayed, the depiction of two lives shared as one: the fetus and the mother. Pregnancy’s symbolization in Namura’s text portrayed the womb as the center point of all bodies: buddhas, fetus, and mother. As the fetus is protected and nourished in body and soul by both the water and blood of the womb and a pantheon of buddhas, the carrier of those bodies—the mother’s body—also attains special identity. Her body— and her behavior toward her body—becomes the prime initiator of her and her fetus’ health. Takai recognized this as well, for when he supplanted the older illustrations with the new set, he left Namura’s writings on the centrality of the body and behavior untouched. Similarly, the Tokugawa period produced a rush of varied depictions of the womb and gestation, particularly in the latter half, that flowed from emerging political and medical discourses, but throughout the period there was common recognition of the critical role a pregnant woman’s behavior played in the destiny of her body and the fetal body. Namura indicates this recognition when he uses the term mimochi in referring to pregnancy.

The word literally means “to have or hold a body.” In pregnancy, mother and child each has an additional body other than her own acting and depending on it. Mimochi has another meaning as well, which spells out the context of Namura’s use. It means “conduct” and denotes practices that a pregnant woman should follow for the benefit of both bodies. For the bulk of his pregnancy chapter, to which I turn next, Namura stresses the beneficial practices of womb teachings (taikyo) based on the behavioral link between the bodies of mother and fetus.