A married clergy and no monastic rule

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.

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.