Neither Monk nor Layman, Shinran's Own Marriage as Precedent

Shinran's own marriage, to a woman generally identified in Jodo Shinshu tradition as Eshinni, followed directly from the 1207 exile that stripped him of his monastic status after Honen's Pure Land movement was suppressed by the court, and rather than treating the loss of formal ordination as an obstacle to teaching, Shinran built a doctrinal identity around it, describing himself in his own writing as neither a monk nor a layman, a phrase Richard Jaffe's study of clerical marriage in Japanese Buddhism identifies as the founding statement behind Jodo Shinshu's later, unusual acceptance of a married, non-celibate teaching lineage. Where most Buddhist monastic codes treat celibacy as a basic marker separating ordained clergy from lay followers, Shinran's own theological position, that liberation depends entirely on Amida's vow and not on any accumulated self-power including monastic discipline, removed the doctrinal ground for treating celibacy as spiritually necessary at all; a married teacher who could not claim the self-power of ascetic discipline was, on Shinran's own logic, in no worse a position relative to Amida's vow than a celibate monk. Jodo Shinshu's clerical lineage descends through Shinran's own family line for many generations, a married succession that had no equivalent among Japan's other major Buddhist schools until much later reforms affected them as well.