On a twelfth-century night in a monk’s quarters on Mount Hiei, the chanting of sutras falls silent and a young monk summons a boy to him. Long hair not yet shaven, cheeks lightly powdered, a robe of silk. The boy is a chigo, an acolyte who attended monks and often shared their bed. Nominally a substitute that preserved the precept against intercourse with women, in practice it was an institutionalised setting for male love within temple culture. Unlike the Buddhism of China and Korea, Japanese Buddhism developed the distinctive institution of the chigo. Where Buddhist ascetic ethics met Japanese practice, a particular religious sexual culture took shape.

Sexuality in Buddhism and Shinto refers to the doctrines, norms, and practices that Japan’s two major religious traditions developed around sex, and to the distinctive religious attitude produced by their fusion. This article covers Buddhist precepts and chigo culture, Shinto’s celebration of life and fertility, and the syncretic period.

Buddhist precepts and sex

Buddhism enjoins the ordained to brahmacarya, abstention from all sexual activity, while laypeople receive the lighter precept against sexual misconduct (sex outside marriage). This dual structure, with different codes for monastics and laity, has held since early Buddhism.

Japanese Buddhism, transmitted through China and Korea, inherited the precept of monastic celibacy as a formal ideal, but from the Heian period the marriage of monks became a tacitly tolerated, then routine, reality. Many monks of Mount Hiei, Mount Koya, and the Nara temples are recorded as keeping wives and children. The 1872 government decree permitting monks to eat meat, marry, and grow their hair simply ratified in law what had long been the reality.

Chigo culture

In medieval Japanese temples, relationships with boys and youths, which did not violate the precept against intercourse with women, were tolerated and institutionalised as a substitute for monastic celibacy. The boys, called chigo, attended monks at Mount Hiei, Mount Koya, the Nara temples, and the Zen monasteries from the twelfth century onward.

A chigo wore his hair long and was powdered and dressed in a manner approaching female attire. The role carried internal gradations of rank, and the boys were typically aged from about eight to eighteen. The framework has been compared to Greek pederasty, with the distinguishing feature that it ran within a religious institution. A body of medieval chigo tales, picture scrolls, and poems survives. This article records the historical difference in age norms as a matter of fact and does not endorse the medieval institution by present-day ethics.

Nanshoku and Buddhism

The medieval and early-modern practice of male love among warriors developed against the background of temple chigo culture. Warriors’ sons placed in temples for education acquired the experience there, and its secularised form is taken as the origin of warrior male love. Ihara Saikaku’s Nanshoku Okagami (1687) placed monk-and-chigo relations, warrior pairings, and townsman male love side by side, showing the breadth of early-modern male-love culture.

Shinto and the celebration of life

Shinto holds, against Buddhist asceticism, a tradition that celebrates sex as the root of life. The opening of the Kojiki (712), in which the deities Izanagi and Izanami give birth to the land, places intercourse as the foundational act of world-creation. Their account of circling the “heavenly pillar” and joining the part of one body that is “excessive” with the part of the other that is “deficient” is the oldest Japanese sexual passage readable as genital metaphor.

This celebration is reflected in festivals. Shrine rites that carry phallic or vulvar images as sacred objects survive across Japan, including the Tagata Shrine fertility festival in Komaki, the Oagata Shrine festival in Inuyama, and the Kanamara festival in Kawasaki. The Shinto position that “sex is not defilement” persisted into the aristocratic society of the Heian period and the commoner society of the early-modern era. Yet childbirth and menstruation were shunned as “blood defilement,” so the Shinto attitude is layered rather than simply affirmative.

The syncretic period

Under the syncretism of Shinto and Buddhism that formed from the late Heian into the medieval period, ascetic ethics and life-celebration coexisted and influenced each other. The esoteric Shingon doctrine of buddhahood in this very body gave rise to the Tachikawa-ryu (13th–14th centuries), which read sexual union as a metaphor for enlightenment. Branded heretical and destroyed in the Northern and Southern Courts period, the school remains a notable section of the sexual-metaphor tradition in Japanese esoteric Buddhism.

Through the Heian and Edo periods, the temple-and-shrine gate towns developed adjacent to pleasure quarters. Pilgrimage and sexual amusement joined on a single circuit at Ise, Zenkoji, Konpira, Narita, and other sites. At the level of doctrine the two attitudes conflicted; at the level of lived practice they fused into a distinctive religious sexual climate.

The modern period

The Meiji separation of Shinto and Buddhism, the patriarchal Meiji Civil Code, and wartime State Shinto brought structural change to the traditional attitudes. The 1872 permission of clerical marriage, the 1906 shrine mergers that pruned folk festivals, and the wartime tightening of sexual morality reorganised these traditions within the modern nation-state.

After the war, Buddhism and Shinto became private religions under the 1951 Religious Corporations Law, and questions of sex passed to individual belief. To this day, the sexual symbols surviving in local festivals, and temple chigo processions now reduced to ceremonial costume parades, work as living echoes of the older attitudes.

See also

• Edo-period sexual culture
• Sexuality in Heian Japan
• Sexuality in Jomon and Yayoi Japan
• History of sexuality in East Asia