A Permission, Not an Order

The text of the proclamation is one sentence. From now on, it says, Buddhist clergy are at liberty to eat meat, to marry, to grow their hair, and so forth; and when they are not engaged in religious observances they may wear ordinary clothing. A separate decree of 1873 extended the liberty to nuns.

Everything turns on the difference between permitting and requiring. Under the Tokugawa shogunate the precepts of the Buddhist orders had been matters of state law. A priest found to have broken celibacy could be exiled or paraded in public, and temples had been made instruments of population registration, so the clergy were a supervised class. The Meiji government withdrew that supervision. It did not tell monks to marry; it stopped punishing them for it, and simultaneously removed the legal privileges of the clerical status.

The reaction inside the orders was not gratitude. Several denominations petitioned against the decree, arguing that the state had no business dissolving vows it had not administered, and that a permission from outside the tradition was as much an interference as a prohibition had been. Some sects continued to discipline married clergy internally for decades. The Jodo Shinshu tradition was the exception with nothing to change: its clergy had married openly since Shinran in the thirteenth century, and the decree simply made the rest of Japanese Buddhism resemble it.