Neither Monk nor Layman: Clerical Marriage in Modern Japanese Buddhism

Richard Jaffe's Neither Monk nor Layman is a scholarly history of clerical marriage in Japanese Buddhism, tracing how Meiji-era state policy legalized what had long been an unofficial or quietly tolerated practice among Buddhist priests, and how that legal change reshaped the social and religious identity of the Japanese priesthood over the following century. Jaffe's authority rests on close archival work in Japanese Buddhist institutional records and state policy documents from a genuinely understudied angle of modern Japanese religious history. As a study focused specifically on the legal and institutional history of clerical marriage, it treats that question in depth while necessarily saying less about doctrinal debate over monastic celibacy within specific Buddhist schools, a related but separate line of inquiry readers may want to pursue further.