This chapter is an excerpt from Chapter I of the forthcoming VOLUME I: An Engaged Buddhist History of Japan: From Its Origins to the Dawn of the 21st Century. (Ontario, Canada: The Sumeru Press, 2023)
Jonathan S. Watts
What is it that makes Japan so unique, not even within the global system of civilizations, but just within its own Buddhist and even East Asian Buddhist socio-cultural systems? An initial clue comes in the concept of “axialization” first developed by the German-Swiss philosopher Karl Jaspers in The Future of Mankind (1961) and then further developed by the Israeli sociologist S.N. Eisenstadt. Among Eisenstadt’s numerous writings on this subject, his immense Japanese Civilization is an attempt to answer the vast mysteries of Japanese historical development in comparison to other civilizations. In keeping with Jaspers, Eisenstadt defines axialization as a process that occurred from around 500 BCE to the 1st Century CE, and even up to the rise of Islam, in certain key locations of highly developed human civilization—such as China, India, Greece, and Mesopotamia—in which “new types of ontological visions, [and] conceptions of a basic tension between the transcendental and mundane orders, emerged and were institutionalized.”[1] Eisenstadt further explains that this tension between the transcendental and mundane gave rise to attempts to reconstruct the mundane world (human personality as well as socio-political & economic orders) according the transcendental vision. In this way, the mundane order was perceived as incomplete, inferior, unsatisfactory, or polluted and in need of being reconstructed according to the principles of a higher ontological or ethical order that bridged the chasm between the transcendental and the mundane orders. The activators of this reconstruction emerged from among “autonomous, relatively unattached ‘intellectuals’, such as prophets or visionaries”. Their visions or teachings ultimately transformed into the basic “hegemonic” premises of their respective civilizations, becoming institutionalized as the dominant orientations of both the ruling and many secondary elites, fully embodied in their respective centers or subcenters (e.g. the Mosaic law in ancient Israel, the Pauline vision in Christianity, Confucian metaphysics in China, Shakyamuni Buddha’s ethics of mind in India).[2]
Eisentsadt and other scholars contend that although Japan did develop a sophisticated philosophical and aesthetic discourse while undergoing continuous institutional and cultural change from both within and from foreign influences, it has yet to fully axialize. Eisenstadt points out that, “The central axis of differentiation between the historical experience of Axial civilizations and that of Japan lies in the strength of the tendency towards the ideologization of changes and struggles in different social and institutional areas”.[3] Eisenstadt feels that while Buddhism and Confucianism provided transcendental visions or ideologies beyond these boundaries, they were eventually “Japanized”—like other foreign systems of universal thought that came into Japan such as western liberalism and Marxist socialism—and subsumed within this “archaic” thought system of Japanese exceptionalism.[4] In conclusion, Eisenstadt echoes Nakamura Hajime’s comments that Japan has never seen itself “as part of a broader civilization, as sharing basic premises and identity with other societies.”[5] This chapter explores the historical tension between Buddhism’s axial tendencies with Japan’s more “tribal”[6] tendencies as a basis for the emergence of Socially Engaged Buddhism in Japan in the modern era, explored in later chapters.
Part I: Buddhism’s Entry into Japan and the Nara Period (646-794)
Context & Beginnings: Japan’s Pre-axial Tribal Structure based on Clan
Buddhism was introduced into Japan in the mid 6th century from Korea through a political alliance with the Baekje, one of the three kingdoms competing for power on the Korean peninsula. By this time, Buddhism was entering its second millennia of historical development, after having served as the civilizational foundation of Ashoka’s empire in the 3rd century BCE; undergone major changes and development in the Mahayana reform movement that spread into Central Asia in the early Common Era; and then being further digested by the rich civilization of China up to its transmission into Korea and Japan in the middle of the 1st millennium CE. Needless to say, the task of Japanese culture—still in its formative stage of development—to digest this massive and highly developed civilizational movement was daunting. In the mid 6th century, according to the renowned Japanese scholar Kuroda Toshio, Japan existed as an “ancient autocratic state” (古代専制国家 koda-sensei kokka) ruled by local chiefs and powerful families, often referred to as clans (氏 uji)[7]. In this way, the early Japanese adopted Chinese Buddhist teachings that the Chinese had already adapted themselves to their own indigenous conception of filial piety, such as compassion (慈悲 jihi) between child and parent rather than towards all sentient beings. From the beginning, Buddhism becomes a faith tied to the maintenance of ancestral cults and practiced through prayers for welfare in this world and the next.[8] Thus, Buddhism with its universal ethics, its call to transcend the world, and its central figures that had renounced clan and family did not find an easy congruence with indigenous Japanese culture.
Pre-Axial Tribal Culture Problem #1: Axial Dialectic vs. Mystical Ritualism
Nakamura Hajime, the pre-eminent Japanese Buddhist scholar of the 20th century, points out the tendency towards what he calls the “limited social nexus” of Japanese society (i.e. the clan and household system) and the stress on inter-personal and non-individual relations, which leads Japanese towards intuitive and emotional forms of communication rather than towards ones based in the logic of a universal understanding of humanity and the world. In the Japanese language, there is the well-known tendency towards vagueness and assumed points in communication with the frequent dropping of subjects and objects. As such, the Japanese language has never been a good medium for expressing philosophical concepts and has depended on the use of Chinese characters in combination to develop such concepts.[9]
When Buddhist logic (因明 inmyo) was introduced to Japan around 661, it was used primarily as a technique of oral expression in question and answer sessions (問答 mondo) at meetings of teachers and students or among monks, rather than as a subject matter in itself. With the rise of esoteric Buddhism in the 9th century, it eventually deteriorated into a ritualized and formalized system of etiquette fitting the aristocratic culture of Heian Buddhism.[10] While Tibetan esoteric Buddhism has maintained the great Indian tradition of logic and debate as centered in the Madhyamika teachings, this did not transmit well into Chinese and Japanese culture. Another influence of the esoteric tradition in Japan was that logic became a field of study that was transmitted orally in a secret transmission to disciples and thus kept from the public with many masters disseminated their writings secretly. Later on, the Soto Zen sect 曹洞宗 developed a tradition called kirigami, manual-like texts (or sometimes just a single sheet of paper) that record Soto teachings secretly handed down from master to disciple. This secretive transmission of teaching reflects more the attitude of the teachers of the Vedic Upanishads and their closed communities[11], which the Buddha rejected even on his death bed by re-affirming to Ananda that he had not held anything back in proclaiming his teachings. Contemporary Soto scholar, Hakamaya Noriaki袴谷憲昭—one of the founders of the Critical Buddhism (批判仏教 Hihan Bukkyo) movement—has also noted that these practices form the basis of Japanese Buddhism’s tendency towards social discrimination.[12]
Thus, from this earliest period, Buddhism had to adapt to cultural tendencies towards intuitive and faith based spirituality through prayer, ritual, and exorcism for “this worldly benefit” (現世利益 gen-se riyaku). Early Japanese saw Buddhism as offering practical benefit as part of the adoption of Chinese and Korean continental culture[13] and the creation of a new state system under the unifying power of an absolute ruler, the emperor. In this way, Buddhist prayers for imperial power and protection of the state were developed from the Chinese along with a variety of apocryphal sutras also originating in China.[14] The adoption of Hindu gods from India is another example of the pick-and-choose method the Japanese took towards the vast spiritual worlds of the Asian continent. In this way, Nakamura notes that, “The Japanese have much in common with the Brahmanists of ancient India … in regarding sin as a kind of material entity, which could easily be purged by means of a ritual of purification.”[15] As we move forward, it is important to note how Shakyamuni often harangued Brahmin priests for the emptiness of their Vedic rituals, while he rationalized and ethicized Brahmanistic ritual concepts. Brahmanism with its emphasis on ancestral rites (sraddha) focused on relationships in the life of the householder, yet remained constrained to a “limited social nexus” by its sexism, classism, and domination by a priestly class. In contrast, the Buddha articulated morality (sila) into a number of different ethical systems for different types of communities[16] in what marks the full ethicization and universalization of the Vedic and samana cultures of India.[17]
Pre-Axial Tribal Culture Problem #2: Purity of Form vs. Purity of Mind & Karmic Determinism
This similarity with Brahmanism in viewing sin, taint, or impurity as something that can be purged by ritual purification leads us into further important parallels with Indian religion and Buddhism’s response to it. There is an essential distinction to be made here between sin and taint or impurity. The latter can be defined as the breaking of community standards or taboos, which may or may not be considered universally moral or ethical outside of that community. The response to such transgression is purification and ritual to re-establish purity and harmony between the human world and the natural or cosmic world. Vedic Brahmanism is the classical example of this type of religious outlook with its wide variety of taboos based around a religiously sanctioned fourfold class society. This class or caste system is based on a descending level of purity from the Brahmin priests themselves down to the lowest Sudra worker class and on outward to the Untouchable class, which is not even considered part of the system.
The concept of sin can be, on the other hand, described as the breaking of universal, transcendent truths and their moral and ethical norms (such as killing, stealing, lying, adultery) that are commonly found in numerous civilizational religions which exist across a variety of nations and cultures, such as Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity. The response to such transgression requires confession and punishment or repentant acts. These acts focus not as much in a ritual resetting of purity but in a change in the transgressor’s attitude and conscience. Indeed, sin in Christianity and dukkha and bad karma in Buddhism are not seen as afflictions of the present material world (i.e. impurity) but as essential “taints” inborn to the human condition. Therefore, their expiation or resolution is not found in an act of physical purification but in an act of psychological or spiritual transformation, which lays the foundation for the final resolution of this human dilemma at the time of death (i.e. gaining eternal Heaven or achieving nirvana upon which birth and death ends). Like Christ’s axialization of the tribal mentality of early Judaism, Buddha axialized the Vedic tradition by rejecting not only the Bhramanistic emphasis on physical purity—such as by begging for leftover food from commoners and accepting Untouchables in the monastic community as equals. He also rejected the Upanishadic emphasis on taint as a material entity afflicting the soul that requires extreme asceticism and self-mortification.[18] Thus, instead of relying on ritual or physical purification, the Buddha taught the cleansing of mental impurity or “affliction” (klesha 煩悩 bonno) through the balanced system of the Three Trainings (Skt. trisiksa 三学 sangaku) of ethics/virtue (sila), meditation (samadhi), and learning/wisdom (prajna). As we will see, this has major ramifications for developing moral and ethical standards that are truly inclusive and do not create graded groups of insiders and outsiders.
The Japanese national character has been deeply defined by these “tribal” characteristics, though Brahmanism’s use of ritual has a more otherworldly bent in the restoration of the transcendental cosmic order. Japan’s physical isolation as an island nation as well as the isolation of communities even within Japan’s mostly mountainous landscape created a “limited social nexus” in which ritual purity became the standard for re-establishing harmony with the only “other”, the natural order. This forms much of the essence of Japanese Shinto and its sacralization of the natural world through an endless designation of “gods” (神 kami). On a deeper level, notions of kega-re (taint or impurity) have informed Japanese morality since the beginning, eventually leading to the creation of its own Untouchable caste known as Burakumin 部落民 in the medieval period. Such orientations have informed modern forms of social discrimination against those who threaten the purity of a family’s, community’s, or even the nation’s gene pool, such as the mentally ill, homosexuals, the homeless, and those afflicted with nuclear radiation (被爆者 hibaku-sha) from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Fukushima.
In this way, the classical notion of the rag wearing Buddhist monk walking barefooted across the countryside and across communities proclaiming a universal value system was not going to be any easy fit in Japan. Indeed, many of the classical aspects of the Buddhist monastic vinaya, such as prohibitions on hard labor, were transformed upon its entry into China. The essential point for understanding the role of the monastic vinaya in Japan, especially for those coming from the classical Theravada tradition, is that its maintenance was never an essential means for gaining transcendence from the world of suffering (dukkha) or liberation from bad karma under the Three Trainings of sila-samadhi-prajna. Unlike Indian culture, the Japanese see the world as inherently sacred, filled with “gods”, and not defiled, so that there is no need to transcend it. Furthermore, emphasis on impurity (kega-re) of conduct rather than “affliction” (klesha) of character entailed proper ritual and led to an emphasis on purity of faith—a trend in the larger East Asian Mahayana tradition that runs counter to emphasis on stoic meditation and penetrating wisdom in the Southeast Asian Theravada tradition. In this way, the role of the monastic vis-à-vis the laity is not as a “field of merit” (Skt. punya-ksetra 福田 fuku-den) gained from the practice of the Three Trainings by which to attain a favorable rebirth. Rather, the monastic becomes a priest-as-ritualist who can reset community harmony through prayers for this worldly benefit, exorcism of impurities, and, most essentially, maintaining ancestral bonds through funerary and memorial rites—the ancestral realm being the only other possible world after death, a topic which will be discussed in more detail later.
Potentials & Pitfalls: Buddhism as Social Ethics or State Ideology? Shotoku’s Universalist Leanings and the Grafting to State
Having covered two major pitfalls in the introduction of Buddhism into Japan, it is time to turn to one of the potentials that Buddhist axialization offered Japan’s nascent culture. It was under the rule of Empress Suiko 推古天皇 (r. 593-628) that Buddhism began to be propagated as a national religion and the first critical Buddhist reformer takes the stage in the Empress’s nephew, the Regent Prince Shotoku 聖徳太子(574-622). As regent to the imperial throne, he played a critical role in the creation of Japan’s first proper nation-state system, specifically through the Seventeen Article Constitution, in which he introduced and assimilated a number of key Buddhist ideas. Unlike his successors, Shotoku appears to have been less interested the ritualistic aspects of Buddhism to protect the state as in a practical ideology to unify and guide Japan’s clan riven society[19]—what we might consider a civilizational or axial impulse.
The Seventeen Article Constitution (十七条憲法 Ju-shichi-jo kenpo)[20] was less of what we would consider today as a document composed of basic laws and statutes. It was more a text focusing on morals and ethics based in the continental cultures of Buddhism and Confucianism to guide government officials and the running of the state under the supreme authority of the emperor. Shotoku’s introduction of the Three Treasures of Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha as well as the understanding of dharma as a universal law that could even transcend the emperor is the first critical Buddhist contribution to the Seventeen Article Constitution. In the 2nd Article, Shotoku writes: “Sincerely revere the Three Treasures, viz., the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha which constitute the final ideal of all living beings and the ultimate foundation of all countries. Should any age or any people fail to esteem this truth? There are few people who are really vicious. They will all follow it if adequately instructed. How can the crooked ways of humans be made straight unless we take refuge in the Three Treasures?”[21] However, his emphasis on following Imperial command in the following 3rd Article highlights the tension between Buddhist law (仏法 buppo) and imperial law (王法 obo) that comes to the fore often in the history of Japanese Buddhism and to a lesser extent in the overall history of Japan, which is generally dominated by the latter. The 1st article also introduces one of the most hallowed concepts of Japanese culture “harmony” (和 wa) stating in short: “Harmony is to be valued, and an avoidance of wanton opposition to be honored … [When] there is concord in the discussion of business, right views of things spontaneously gain acceptance. Then what is there which cannot be accomplished!” There are some who feel “harmony” is a Buddhist concept, such as in the “six ways that Buddhist practitioners should live in harmony and be sensitive and caring towards each other” (六和敬 roku wa-kyo)[22], yet this also appears to be an innovation made by the Chinese tradition.This 1st article along with the 3rd buttress the 2nd on revering the Three Treasures, highlighting the syncretic character of the Seventeen Article Constitution as a mix of Buddhist, Confucian, and Japanese sentiments. While they are seen as the foundations for Japanese morals and social ethics, post-war Buddhist social critics like Ichikawa as well as Hakamaya Noriaki and Matsumoto Shiro of the Critical Buddhism movement feel Shotoku’s constitution forms the basis of Japanese totalitarianism and the spiritual bankruptcy of 19th and 20th century Japanese imperialism.[23]
A second key Buddhist aspect to Shotoku’s thought is his emphasis on it as a practical way of living. In contrast to the highly ritualistic forms of esoteric Buddhism that came to dominate Japan in the Heian period, Shotoku attempted to present Buddhism within a concrete, secular social life while emphasizing the Mahayana bodhisattva ideal of serving people’s needs now.[24] In keeping with the Japanese and East Asian emphasis on the sanctity of this world, Shotoku chose three sutras for guiding the nation in his Commentary on Three Sutras that are all lay in orientation: the Vimalikirti Sutra, the Lotus Sutra, and the Srimala Sutra[25]. In this commentary, he indicates there is no difference in value between the sacred and profane, the religious and secular, and venerating the Buddha and showing compassion to a beggar.[26] Here we see the beginnings of a critical aspect of Japanese Buddhism that remains predominant to this day, the elevation of the lay Buddhist path. While the corruption of the monastic order as a beacon to committed, intensive Buddhist practice is an ongoing problem in Japanese Buddhism, the opposite side of this shadow is the ownership of the tradition taken by Japanese lay Buddhists. The lack of an empowered lay sangha is not only an important issue in the transcendentalized Theravada traditions of Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka, it was also an important factor in the final decline of Buddhism in India in the 10th century C.E. A third essential aspect of Shotoku’s dharma is the teaching of “repaying or returning benefits” (報恩 ho-on), another concept that is somewhat foreign to the Indian and Theravada Buddhist traditions and appears to be another innovation of the Chinese. In Chinese Buddhism, it was defined in terms of the practice of the four types of on (四恩 shi-on) towards parents, all sentient beings, rulers, and the Three Treasures. ForShotoku, on became a key moral concept to fuse together Buddhist ethics and East Asia’s more indigenous ethics of loyalty to parents, elders, and authority.[27]
Part II: The Age of Esoteric Buddhism & the Heian Period (794-1185)
Potentials for Axialization
The Heian period marks a major shift in Japanese culture in a number of ways. Firstly, the capital was moved from Nara to Kyoto (then known as Heian-kyo), and while the emperor remained as the figurehead of the state, Japan was increasingly run by the powerful Fujiwara clan. This separation of authority rested in the emperor and power in the Fujiwaras marked the early development of particular governing style, which still endures in Japan and will become a key point of reference in the latter part of this volume. In this period, the aforementioned “ancient autocratic state” consisting of various local clans and chiefs was consolidated under the Fujiwara.[28] Concurrently, there was also the breakdown in the spiritual authority of these clans and of the state sponsored Buddhism of the Nara period. We see in the Nihon Ryoi-ki 日本霊異記—an early history of the condition of religion and the common people in the late 8th and early 9th centuries—the emergence of wandering holy men (聖 hijiri), like the new wandering Buddhist monk of 5th century India, and their appeal to the new provincial culture of this period. Two of the greatest such hijiri to emerge from the early Heian were Saicho 最澄 (767-822), the founder of the Tendai sect, and Kukai 空海 (774-835), the founder of the Shingon sect 真言宗. The founding of the Tendai and Shingon Sanghas signified a more progressive assertion of spiritual independence and agency by the common people. It added a second way to evaluate the human condition beyond the worldly designations of high and low class to the more spiritual designations of sagely 聖 and unenlightened 凡.[29] This designation of unenlightened, common person, or fool (Skt. prthag-jana 凡夫 bonbu), however, was not a denigration as in the Indian and Theravada traditions. Rather, it became the focus of the spiritual potential of the common person as emphasized in the later Mahayana, especially Pure Land, tradition. This new Mahayana spirit of Heian Buddhism becomes a perennial feature of Japanese Buddhism going forward, especially in the later Pure Land movement, and mirrors the spiritual democracy and egalitarianism of Shakyamuni’s ministry in ordaining women and outcastes.
Full spiritual egalitarianism, however, was not to be accomplished in the Heian period. These hijiri were often feared as much for their magical powers as they were revered for their ties to the people. In the Nihon Ryoi-ki 日本霊異記, karma is explained less as an empowering means of ethical action to change one’s life and more as a kind of karmic determinism explaining fortune, misfortune, “the inescapability of karmic effects (現報 genpo)”, and one’s position in the new varieties of class division. This inescapability fueled a fear of karma and led to an explanation of the Three Treasures as having thaumaturgic powers that could save people and deliver them from the fearful powers of the authorities and even the emperor. Kuroda sums up this period by noting that the common people still maintained “a certain weakness … an inability to assert their spiritual independence or to conceive of themselves as active agents.”[30] Still, this is one of the few periods in Japan when the universal and axial teachings of Buddhism or dharma (buppo) were seen to supersede indigenous values and the imperial law (obo).
From Universalism to the Buddhist State
From the hijiri’s travels through the mountains and villages of provincial Japan, we return to the centers of power in the old capital of Nara and the new capital of Heian-kyo (Kyoto). The ruling class was in a state of crisis regarding their own existence, reflected in the political intrigues and secret plots of the mid-8th to 10th centuries and the decline of numerous aristocratic families. As Kuroda points out, it was no longer possible to dwell comfortably in the all-encompassing state of the ancient era. Perhaps for the first time in Japanese history, an “objective” consideration of the state became necessary along with a new political ideology and new religious concepts to legitimize and mediate it.[31] In tandem with the emerging presence of Buddhist teachings and practices as a trans-local, if not universal, force, the concept of the “spiritual protection of state” (鎮護国家 chingo kokka), in which Buddhism played a central role, became increasingly important. Saicho and Kukai eventually showed a great interest in cultivating relations with the new powers at Heian-kyo and in the creation of what they may have viewed as a true Mahayana State under chingo kokka. By the middle of the Heian period, the Tendai and Shingon sects were dominated by the sons of nobles who had ordained and brought their political intrigues into the precincts of the sacred Mt. Hiei and Mt. Koya, eventually leading to a variety of armed conflicts involving ordained and quasi-ordained monastics.
Kuroda makes an essential point in this shift from the Fujiwara regency (967-1068) to the Insei government[32] in latter part of 11th century as featuring not only an ideological tension between the imperial system or imperial law (obo) and Buddha law or the dharma (buppo) but also a parallel structural tension between the political power base in Kyoto and the new political power bases at the three main Buddhist centers of Nara, Mt. Hiei, and Mt. Koya.[33] This tension is first expressed in the 8th century when the concept of the “origin and manifestation” (本地垂迹 honji-suijaku) is developed, in which Japanese gods (kami) came to be regarded as manifestations of buddhas and bodhisattvas—even in the cases of the great Sun Goddess Amaterasu 天照大神 as the Buddha Mahavairocana and the deity Hachiman 八幡大神 as the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara.[34] Later, in the beginning of the 11th century, the tension is expressed in the concepts of imperial law (obo)and Buddha law or dharma (buppo), especially during the period of the Insei system (1086-1156) when retired emperors remained in power from their cloistered residences within Buddhist monastic communities. As such, obo-buppo signifies the joining of these two major factions into one national ruling system, not just as an ideological force but also as a structural system. From an ideological standpoint that sees the potential for Buddhism to act as an ethical and civilizational force, the actual role of the dharma as buppo in this period seems suspect. As noted above, the esoteric Buddhism of this period, while containing a Mahayana spirit, was still overly focused on thaumaturgy rather than the social and political ethics of the Buddha’s standards for the “moral king” (dharma-raja) and for republican assemblies.[35] In this way, we need to turn our attention to some of the key teachings of Heian esoteric Buddhism.
The Rise of Esoteric Buddhism as a Socio-Political Ideology
The Heian period, covering most of the 9th to 12th centuries, is part the rise of esoteric or Vajrayana Buddhism throughout Asia: from the great Srivijaya empire based in Sumatra (8th-12th cent.) which featured the building of the Borobudor complex in central Java in the 9th century; the entry and flowering of Vajrayana Buddhism in Tibet from the 8th century onward; and the establishment of the Angkor Empire in Cambodia in the 9th century with the building of Angkor Wat in the 12th. The Vajrayana tradition has come under scrutiny within Buddhism itself due to its heavy influence from other Indian religious forms like Saivism, including a number of unorthodox practices, such as ritualized sex and the consumption of alcohol and meat. However, its development, especially by the Tibetans, of spiritual insight coupled with high-level Mahayana ethics cannot be disputed. Indeed, it is said to have pacified Tibetan culture from an amalgam of constantly warring clans to a theocracy built around the first precept of non-harming.
Kuroda Toshio has posited that the distinctive form of Japanese esoteric Buddhism, called the ken-mitsu system (顕密体制 ken-mitsu taisei), provided a highly elaborate dharma (buppo) that not only unified all of Buddhism in the Heian Period but also created the ideological foundation for the social and political order, as mentioned above. The ken-mitsu system is a fusing of the supposedly more straightforward or exoteric teachings (顕 ken) with the more complex or profound esoteric teachings (密 mitsu). While Shingon was more “purely” focused on the esoteric teachings, Tendai created a distinctive hybrid system based on Saicho’s original vision of the Mahayana that brought together the Lotus Sutra, esotericism, meditation, and precepts (円密禅戒 en-mitsu-zen-kai) with an emphasis on the harmonization of the first two.[36] As the supposed benefits of such practices fed the interests of the ruling Heian aristocracy, Tendai found itself bending its doctrine more deeply to such esoteric forms. Shingon, as well, became increasingly focused on demands to provide practical benefits through such acts of ritual magic.[37]
As important as these esoteric practices were to the Heian era, perhaps the greater legacy of this period for the development of Japanese Buddhism and subsequent forms of social ethics is the teaching of “original enlightenment” or “innate enlightenment” (本覚 hongaku). In short, hongaku means that since all sentient beings are endowed with buddha-nature, one is innately or already enlightened. As such, one must simply awaken from one’s present state of delusion, perhaps spontaneously or suddenly, rather than tread the long path of numerous rebirths to gain the state of enlightenment attained by Shakyamuni and other great monastic practitioners. This concept of hongaku, of which there is no Indian Sanskrit equivalent, along with “the womb of the Tathagata” (Skt. tathagata-garbha 如来蔵 nyorai-zo) and buddha-nature (仏性 bussho) are predominantly developed in the East Asian tradition. As a later development, it marks the high point of the ken-mitsu system in Tendai during the Insei period in which the present world is absolutely affirmed and rituals are performed for “this worldly-benefit” (現世利益 gen-se riyaku).[38] At face value, hongaku seems to embrace the Mahayana emphasis on the equality of all, rejecting the transcendentalization of nirvana as a state only realizable by the greatest of ascetics. However, Kuroda and other post-war Buddhist social critics, like those in the Critical Buddhism movement, have noted that ken-mitsu Buddhism’s “uncritical acceptance of everything” and desire to appeal to the state and the masses allowed it to become “the ideology of the medieval establishment”.[39] Furthermore, this world-affirming tendency of hongaku was “more commonly interpreted as an authoritarian discourse that legitimated social hierarchy and the entrenched system of rule.”[40] In the end, rather than becoming a teaching accessible to all persons who categorically all possess buddha-nature, enlightenment once again becomes the provenance of the elite ascetic.
The ken-mitsu ideology as quintessentially expressed by hongaku further extended the Japanese de-emphasis on the transcendental and potentially axial aspects of Buddhism. While de-mythifying the Indian and Theravada ideal of the Buddhist monk as either the ascetic hermit in the jungle or the puritanical practitioner of the monastic precepts or rules (vinaya) living aloof from society, the ken-mitsu ideology with hongaku at its center seemed to go too far the other way. It allowed any behavior by monastics to be rationalized by the lack of distinction in this “empty” (sunnata) world where enlightenment was already present and could be realized in a sudden flash or where the distinctions between good and evil were the deluded fixations of a dualistic mind.[41] From the heavily immanental or world-affirming view of the ken-mitsu ideology, we can begin to understand Japanese Buddhism’s very unorthodox approach to the monastic vinaya, seen as one of the non-negotiable pillars of the entire Buddhist monastic tradition. Saicho, in his wish to emphasize the full development of Mahayana Buddhism and establish his teachings apart from the Nara schools, rejected the full 250 precepts of the classical Indian monastic vinaya, and in their place, he prescribed, along with twelve years of ascetic practice on Mt. Hiei, ordination and training in the 10 major and 48 minor bodhisattva precepts or “perfect and immediate precepts” (円頓戒 endon-kai).[42] In this way, maintaining the monasticvinaya and the traditionally strict separation between ordained and lay found in most of the Buddhist world were not important aspects of this new world of Heian Mahayana Buddhism. This culture continues on in contemporary Japan with the strength of lay Buddhist denominations and the way a fully ordained priest from the traditional denominations might change from robes to a business suit for work just as his forbearers might have changed from robes to battle gear.
Indeed, the most egregious breach of monastic vinaya that emerges in the Heian period is the variety of armed persons of various levels of ordination, collectively known as sohei 僧兵—a Buddhist oxymoron of the highest order combining the characters for monk (僧 so) and warrior (兵 hei). Living with and often controlling the powerful new centers of Heian Buddhism (the Enryaku-ji & Onjo-ji temples of Tendai, the Kofuku-ji & Todai-ji in Nara, and Mt. Koya and the Negoro-ji of Shingon), these militarized Buddhists[43] serve as a symbol of the decline of the imperial government in the late Heian from the beginning of 10th century into 12th century as well as the shift into the warrior dominated culture of the Kamakura and Muromachi periods.[44] While we might lay the blame for this development on the ken-mitsu ideology, it is vital to also look at the structural causes, principally the influx of warrior-retainers accompanying the Heian nobles who were ordaining at these great monastic centers and bringing their political rivalries with them.[45] Violence within the monasteries also came from class conflicts between these noble monks, scholar monks, and lower rank commoner monks, who all claimed the right to take leadership of the temples. Isolated incidents gave way to more distinct militarized campaigns by the late 11th century, when any political campaign needed the support of these big monasteries. As Mikael Adolphson, author of a lengthy volume on the history of monastic warriors, notes, “We find no evidence anywhere that these [monk] commanders either considered it somehow unethical or inappropriate to head such forces, nor did they seem to use religious rhetoric in their efforts to rally the support of the clergy.”[46]
The Rise of the Pure Land Hijiri as Messengers of an Axial Age
As in the Nara Period, the figure of the hijiri—the itinerant wandering practitioner who broke from the established enclaves and systems of power—played a critical role in the latter days of the Heian period, breaking away from the rampant political and monastic corruption at the three great centers of Japanese Buddhism on Mt. Hiei, Mt. Koya, and at Nara. What is fascinating about this particular movement is that it centered around a group of itinerant Pure Land practitioners, who would eventually take the world affirming character of Japanese Buddhism to its logical extreme while also acting as a source of axial values to transcend the ken-mitsu ideology that fused Buddhism to the state. As Buddhism continued to grow and develop during the Heian, the character of the hijiri changed to a distinctive lifestyle reflected in clothing, behavior, and dwelling places.[47] Generally, there were those who lived in detached hermitages (別所 bessho) on the outskirts of major temples or those who lived as wandering itinerants and practiced the earlier tradition of thaumaturgy. As society plunged more deeply into violence in the latter part of the Heian, such self-ordained monks and their anti-establishment character became increasingly appealing to the common people.[48]
The development of a distinctive hijiri movement in the Heian comes from the rise of Pure Land Buddhism as a secondary stage in the flowering of the ken-mitsu esoteric system. Whereas the core of esoteric Buddhist practice focuses on the recitation of Sanskrit mantras, Pure Land practice, specifically as it developed in China, emphasized the recitation of the Buddha Amitabha name’s (南無阿弥陀仏 namu-amida-butsu), known as the nenbutsu (Skt. buddhasmrti 念仏). The iconic figure of Kuya 空也 (903-972), known as the “market place hijiri”, marks an important point in this emergence of Pure Land Buddhism wedded with the hijiri phenomenon. While still known for his thaumaturgic powers, he is hailed as a figure who brought “the true nature of the nenbutsu as a Mahayana Bodhisattva practice” to the common people.[49] In this way, a critical aspect of the hijiri movement is that it “encouraged self-assertion and a critical spirit among self-reliant individuals”. The groups of people living at detached hermitages (bessho) and forming local nenbutsu associations “were fundamentally different from natural communities in that they were composed of self-aware individuals … united by shared religious regulations and a strong sense of common bond.” They were distancing themselves from the increasingly corrupt and violent secular and monastic settings of daily life and “in so doing developed the potential to become critical of both the secular and the monastic”.[50] As Kuroda concludes, “Their emergence presented a historic opportunity for the establishment of a non-authoritarian, non-institutional discourse.”[51]
Part III: Buddhist Axialization & the Kamakura Period (1185-1333)
Mappo: The Ontological Shift that Opened the Way to a Spiritual & Social Revolution
It was amidst the descent into political and social chaos and warfare that the optimism of the early Heian gave way to a new spiritual attitude towards the world, summed up in the Buddhist concept of mappo 末法, the Age of the Final Dharma or Latter Dharma. This concept is, as we have seen on numerous occasions, an innovation of Chinese culture and East Asian Buddhism. The teaching of the Three Ages had already been brought to Japan at an early period through Prince Shotoku’s examination of it in his aforementioned Commentary on Three Sutras (Sangyo-gi-sho). However, Prince Shotoku and other early Japanese Buddhists were focused on using Buddhism to build a new system for sacralizing and legitimizing the state and did not calculate that Buddhism had entered this final stage and was in decline. It was the famous Tendai Pure Land master Genshin 源信 (942-1017) who marked a major shift in this discourse. Having personally suffered from the corruption of his own sect through power politics, he wrote the Essentials for Birth in the Pure Land (往生要集 Ojoyo-shu) as an elaborate warning of karmic retribution for those living amidst the corruption of this age. “From the second half of the eleventh century then, the expression ‘final age’ (末世 mas-se) occurs in many diaries, novels, and works of history, often bringing with it a connotation of fear and inevitability.”[52] In this new age, it was felt by some that monks and nuns could not be expected to live up to the standards set by the Buddha in the Age of the True Dharma and that monks and nuns who strive to keep the precepts and the ancient way are overly tied to the formal rules of Buddhism while losing the deeper human spirit of the dharma.[53] It appears, then, that the Kamakura Buddhist revolutionaries were trying to recapture the critical spirit Saicho had towards Nara Buddhism and the government’s control of the monastic Sangha as well as his deeper dedication to the bodhisattva way of the true Mahayana. In this way, mappo marks a significant shift in Japanese outlook from one that always affirmed this world to one that, like Indian culture, saw it as defiled and in need of escape.
However, there is an important caveat here as well as parallel to the Buddha’s response to the Indian discourse of samsara and the Kamakura Buddhist master’s response to mappo. The Buddha, of course, taught the Middle Way of an integrated sangha of monastic and lay, while rejecting the worldly escapism of the Upanishadic ascetics and the worldly corruption of the Brahmin ritualists. The Kamakura masters were clearly rejecting the worldly corruption of the Tendai, Shingon, and Nara Buddhist centers. Yet their embrace of the mappo discourse was not to create a new elitist form of ascetic, world renouncing monastics but rather create what I believe is a truly axial solution that “bridged the chasm between the transcendental and the mundane orders”. This led to a full flowering of the Buddha dharma in Japan in “intentional ethical action” (i.e. Buddhist karma) through bodhisattva ethics (sila), an empowering form of “single practice” available to the common person (samadhi), and a spiritual vision that did not posit an essentialized source of power and its graded emanations but a completely integrated view of the cosmos that provided a democratic social vision (prajna). The challenge of realizing such a delicate balance in an age of anarchic violence would, as we will see, prove to fraught with stumbling blocks.
The Kamakura Axial Revolution: From Pure Land’s Elevation of the Common Person to Zen’s Actualized Enlightenment to Nichiren’s Liberation of the World
Honen, having lived most of his life in the Heian era, is considered the first of these revolutionaries not just by chronology but also for the audacity of his teachings. Ordained as a young boy in the Tendai tradition, he spent his formative years attempting to penetrate the core of the Mahayana teachings as a cloistered hijiri (別所聖 bessho hijiri) amidst the growing anarchy of life on Mt. Hiei. Ironically, as Saicho had rejected the Nara establishment, he rejected the Mt. Hiei establishment and its teachings, leaving the mountain to set up a ministry on the edges of Kyoto focused on the “single-minded” recitation of Amitabha Buddha’s name, known as the senju–nenbutsu 専修念仏. The senju–nenbutsu was revolutionary in a number of ways. It clearly rejected the complex fusion of Buddhist teachings in the Tendai ken-mitsu system, the mastery of which was only possible for an elite class of ascetic monastics cloistered on holy mountains. Standing firmly in a belief in mappo, Honen proclaimed that the simple recitation of Amitabha’s name, even just ten times, could erase eons of bad karma and gain one entry into Amitabha’s Pure Land at the moment of death. This teaching, however, was not designed as a simplified, inferior version of dharma practice, often given by monks to lay people whom they feel are unable to realize the highest forms of Buddhist practice. Rather, in this era of mappo, the senju-nenbutsu was the best and indeed only way of realizing the highest goal of Buddhism, eventual enlightenment after Birth in the Pure Land (ojo). The proclamation of such an audacious teaching by Honen, who was a highly respected practitioner-scholar among the general monastic world, was the proclamation of a spiritual revolution in which all were empowered to practice and realize. As Pure Land Buddhism developed under the Chinese, especially Shandao (善導 613-681), the idea that only bodhisattvas far advanced in practice could enter the Pure Land was flipped on its head so that under Amitabha’s radical vow of deep compassion the most defiled and mired in bad karma, known as bonbu 凡夫, became the first subject of salvation. Honen’s isolation of this teaching into a single, exclusively focused school of practice marked a spiritual revolution that in many ways was a call to social revolution—a kind of liberation theology for the masses to throw off the domination of the Heian aristocracy and the clan warlords and seek for their own independence.[54] As a social movement, this was not initiated in Honen’s lifetime but came to fore in the Pure Land rebellions (一向一揆 ikko-ikki) of the 15th and 16th centuries.
The key notion of Honen’s senju-nenbutsu as a single, “exclusive” practice simple enough for all to achieve was subsequently adopted by Dogen in his simple practice of “just sitting meditation” (只管打坐 shikan-taza) and Nichiren’s simple and singular recitation of taking refuge in the Lotus Sutra (題目 daimoku). In terms of the tension between practice and realization, Honen is most conspicuous among the Kamakura masters for never addressing hongaku in his teaching, what must be considered a most conscious omission if not rejection as a highly accomplished Tendai scholar.[55] Compared to Shinran, Dogen, and Nichiren, Honen is considered to have more deeply emphasized the schism between the mundane and the transcendental in his strong admonition to chant the nenbutsu as much as possible to attain liberation from this world of suffering through Birth in the Pure Land. While gently reassuring lay people from all classes that, however much they practice, a sincere mind was also an essential component to such Birth, he drove himself and his monastic disciples in a rigorous life of more than 50,000 recitations per day.[56]
If Honen’s emphasis on mappo and the injunction to recite the name of Amitbaha as much as possible could be seen as a more transcendentalist notion of the need for more practice to escape this world of suffering, then Shinran’s even greater emphasis on one’s nature as bonbu seemed to lead to a new conclusion that returned to the more immanental view of hongaku. Shinran felt that the depth of this deluded human nature in fact made it impossible to practice even the nenbutsu as a means to reaching Amitabha. Such an attainment could never be the cause of practice or through human agency but only by the cause or vow of Amitabha. One could quickly conclude that this idea seems to lead to the sort of devotional theism as found in the bhakti movements of Hinduism or even the abstract monism of Tendai hongaku—both prone to a system of graded levels of spiritual power and agency prone to abuse. The Shin Buddhist, however, would de-emphasize the focus on the ontological positions of an eternal being or essential nature and emphasize the existential situation of the bonbu living amidst suffering—more of “the absolute based upon the relative”.[57] This standpoint returns to Honen’s total indifference and neglect to addressing the ontological issues found in the hongaku and buddha-nature teachings and re-affirms the aforementioned Chinese Pure Land master Daochuo’s emphasis on how the teaching must fit the people and the time they live in. Shinran’s teaching seems to actually flip hongaku on its head as not a rationalization of the status quo of those in power but as an empowerment of those with no power, the bonbu, and their blessedness and agency to attain salvation “just as they are”. Instead of being innately enlightened, Pure Land Buddhists are innately deluded and that means they are more fit to realize salvation due to their groundedness in the realities of the suffering world.
While Honen and Shinran literally turned Buddhism upside down in their development of a teaching that fit the time and age of mappo, Dogen could be said to have turned Buddhism inside out in his resolution to the tension between the transcendental drive to transform mind through practice and the engagement in suffering through acceptance of the world. His ability to recapture the practical essence of Nagarjuna’s Madhyamika thought makes him “generally considered to have been the greatest Japanese philosophical thinker”.[58] Dogen’s revolutionary spirit is first expressed in his rejection of the mainstream Linji Chan school during his study in China from 1223-1227. The Chan tradition, in general, was against the intellectual study of the sutras, emphasizing realization through the study and practice of koans to short circuit the discursive mind so as to access the true Mind. Dogen criticizes the approach of using koans as simply nonsensical ways to cut off thought: “How pitiable are they who are unaware that discriminating thought is words and phrases, and that words and phrases liberate discriminating thought.”[59] The second revolutionary aspect of Dogen’s mastery in applying radical “emptiness” (sunnata) was to resolve the koan of hongaku and the question of how much practice is appropriate. In the “buddha-nature” (bussho) fascicle of the Shobogen-zo, he does not read the Mahaparinirvana Sutra as saying, “All sentient being have buddha-nature”—as Saicho and most Mahayana masters did. Rather, he reads it as, “All sentient beings are buddha-nature”, thereby rejecting buddha-nature as a sort of essential dharma or ontological form. This in turn led him to deny the usual duality between practice and realization. “To think that practice and realization are not identical is a non-Buddhist view … practice must be considered to point directly to intrinsic realization.”[60]
Nichiren, the final of the Kamakura Buddhist revolutionaries, would take the soteriological implications of Honen, Shinran, and Dogen to their logical conclusion by outrightly proclaiming a theology based on the transformation of society and not just the individual.[61] As a young boy, Nichiren ordained in the Tendai tradition and eventually came to see himself as the person to revive the Tendai sect after centuries of decay and revive Saicho’s original vision of the Mahayana path under the engaged bodhisattva. This vision led him to leave Mt. Hiei and begin his career preaching and converting people to faith in the Lotus Sutra through the recitation of “taking refuge in the Lotus Sutra” (南無妙法蓮華經 namu-myo-horenge-kyo or, in short, 題目 daimoku). This vision also included a strident form of teaching called shaku-buku 折伏 (lit. “to break and subdue”)[62] that involved rebuking attachment to all provisional teachings. This path led him to settle down in the new capital of Kamakura in eastern Japan, which was filled with temples of the new Pure Land and Zen sects sanctifying the regime of the new military government detached from imperial power in Kyoto. Nichiren’s ministry there included offering unsolicited warnings to the Kamakura military government about the need to make the Lotus Sutra the sole Buddhist teaching of the nation in order to avoid the calamities befalling it, including the imminent invasion of the Mongols. In this environment, Nichiren’s sharp denunciation of other sects, especially Pure Land and the bakufu’s first choice of Rinzai Zen, created major disturbances and led to his exile on Sado Island off the wind-blown coast of the Japan Sea. Both the Pure Land and Nichiren orders became beacons to the lower classes, women, and social outcastes living in the dark of the violent rivalries of the ruling classes. However, for Honen, realization of the Pure Land came in the next world, while for Nichiren, realization of the Pure Land came in this world. For him, embrace of the Lotus Sutra would actually transform the present world both materially and spiritually.[63] In this way, Nichiren, perhaps more than any of the other Kamakura Buddhist masters, fits the definition of axialization by creating a new ontological vision that would resolve the tension of the social and spiritual collapse of the Heian-Kamakura period as the Age of the Final Dharma with the higher enlightened order of the Buddha’s Pure Land as realized in the path of the bodhisattva found in the Lotus Sutra. In many ways, it is a complete Buddhist path with a critique of suffering and its causes as per the first two Noble Truths, a vision of the Buddha’s Pure Land as in the Third Noble Truth, and finally the practical path of the bodhisattva as per the Fourth Noble Truth.
The Legacy of Kamakura Buddhism I: The Ethics of Death & Karma
From the standpoint of the basic re-envisioning of the Buddhist path by the Kamakura masters, there is consequentially a whole series of shifts in the way other key parts of the Japanese Buddhist tradition could be and were understood. In the teaching of mappo, the very this-worldly emphasis of Japanese Buddhism is tempered with an injunction towards a higher truth to transcend this world of suffering. Nakamura Hajime notes that the early Japanese via primitive Shinto saw the value of life in this world and did not reflect deeply on the soul or death. They worried little about death or what came after, believing that one’s soul (魂 tama) continues on in this world after death.[64] Buddhism’s arrival in Japan presented a vast new way of understanding the meaning of death and the meaning of life. Its emphasis on karma and the quality of mental purity rather than physical purity meant it had few taboos or notions of pollution in dealing with the dead.[65] Perhaps more importantly, Buddhism’s notion of a personal, private identity that might transcend one’s family and social group had, and still has, significant ramifications for how the individual Japanese sees their place in society and the world beyond Japan. In the Heian Period, the great Tendai Pure Land master Genshin helped to popularize the classical six realms of Buddhist reincarnation as well as karma as a metaphysical system of cause and effect and rewards and punishments through his famous work the Essentials for Birth in the Pure Land (Ojoyo-shu). In these early stages, however, we can still see that a good death was the right of a highly trained ascetic, like Genshin and his comrades on Mt. Hiei.
As such, the normative model of Buddhist death—in which Right Mindfulness (Skt. samyak-smriti 正念 sho-nen, the seventh practice of the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path) is essential at the time of death—was still prevalent. This model believes that one’s state of mind at death is as much as one hundred times more significant as any other mental activity in life in determining what one’s post mortem fate will be. As we have seen, however, Honen’s teaching of Pure Land practice flipped notions of spiritual practice and attainment on their heads. While he taught nenbutsu practice as essential, he also emphasized the grace or “other power” (他力 tariki) of Amitabha’s vow to liberate all sentient beings. As an ordinary, deluded fool (bonbu) in this Age of the Final Dharma, traditional forms of Buddhist enlightenment were considered virtually impossible. The best path to Birth in Amitabha’s Pure Land was not gained through either ritual purification or the realization of a meditative mindfulness at the moment of death, or even the recitation of the nenbutsu as a mantra creating positive karmic results.[66] Ojo was the gift of Amitabha, and so Honen instructed his followers to die “just as they are”, simply reciting the nenbutsu a mere ten times at the moment of death. Shinran’s even greater emphasis on pure faith further disconnected the link between practice, and specifically the maintenance of Buddhist precepts (sila), as a causal link to a better rebirth.
The Legacy of Kamakura Buddhism II: The Effect of the New Spiritual Movement on Socio-Political Structure
As with the previous Heian regimes, the new Kamakura military government was also not free from the desire to sacralize their rule with esoteric ritual and thaumaturgic rites. In the early days of the Kamakura period in 1199, Eisai栄西 (1141-1215)—the nominal founder of the Japanese Rinzai sect—was invited by Hojo Masako—the widow of the founder of the Kamakura bakufu Yoritomo—to become the founder of the first Zen temple in the city called Jufuku-ji 寿福寺. As the Hojo regents came to control the Kamakura government, their interest in the high culture of Song dynasty China, epitomized in the erudite Chan (Zen) monk, developed as an alternative form of sacralization to the Tang dynasty Buddhism of esoteric Tiantai (Tendai) that sacralized the ken-mitsu system. Tokiyori, the 5th regent, and some of the other regents developed a keen appreciation for Zen practice inviting actual Chan monks from China to form the first great Rinzai monasteries of Kamakura. Zen, with its emphasis on physical self-discipline and practical rather than intellectual wisdom, certainly appealed to the spirit of the new warrior class.However, few samurai had the intellectual curiosity or capability to study the sophisticated forms of Song era Chan through the medium of Chinese, which was the typical way these imported Chinese masters instructed.[67] In this way, the Kamakura bakufu also indulged in the esoteric rites performed by other Buddhist schools as well as Shinto to create a rival form of zen-mitsu 禅密ideology to counter the ken-mitsu ideology that sacralized the Kyoto imperial government.[68] We may also consider this time as the beginning of the fusion of Zen Buddhism and the Japanese Way of the Warrior (武士道 bushi-do), which has received so much attention for its promotion during Japan’s militarization in the early 20th century.
Nichiren is the most complex of the Kamakura masters in his relationship to the political order. In his final years, he came to the conclusion that the emperor is the ruler of Japan in name only.[69] With a vision of a transcendent “world of the Lotus Sutra” (法華經の世界 Hokke-kyo-no sekai), all legitimacy of rule was to be judged solely by the standard of whether or not the Lotus Sutra was upheld.[70] This investment in the ultimate authority of the Lotus Sutra undercut and even inverted “all hierarchies constructed on other bases”, including loyalty to husband, parent, or lord.[71] Nichiren saw that Buddhism is not in the service of the ruler but, rather, the ruler is obligated to protect the Buddha Dharma. In this way, the lower orders of society, including warriors, rejected the tradition of thaumaturgic rites for good fortune that had become the dominant form of religious practice and faith in the Heian era and developed new vibrant forms of village communal activity[72], specifically in what are known as confraternities (講 ko). The confraternities acted as ways to teach and spread the new visions of the Kamakura Buddhist masters and, especially among the Pure Land and Lotus Sutra groups, did not depend on or fixate around ordained monastic leaders. Based on such universal and inclusive ideologies, they connected to a national network of such associations that eventually connected to the centers of these major new sects and their monastic leaders.[73]In the countryside, the nenbutsu-ko of the Pure Land schools and the new Soto Zen communities based around local warriors would emerge as major social forces along with the rapid rise of Nichiren based groups in Kyoto tied to the merchant class. All represented a clear break with the ken-mitsu system and supported religion by self-governing communities from the lower strata of society.[74]
Part IV: Religio-Ideological Conflict and the Rising of the Masses in the Muromachi Period (1333-1558)
The Muromachi period, roughly defined as lasting from 1333-1558, is a complex time of multiple shifts through the brief restoration of imperial rule in the Northern & Southern Court period; the century long domination of the Ashikaga military government into the late 15th century; the roughly century long Warring States period, and the final succession of the great warlords Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu—the last of whom finally consolidated Japan under a single rule for the next two and a half centuries. As noted, the late Heian and Kamakura periods marked the rise of the samurai class to rival the power of the Nara and Kyoto based aristocratic clans. In the Muromachi, this rise was confirmed and consolidated with the increasing emergence of regional lords called daimyo with their own military forces. While the three main centers of ken-mitsu Buddhism still maintained military forces and connections to political elites until the end of the 16th century, their ken-mitsu rhetoric based around the fusion of obo-buppo waned in importance as the new zen-mitsu ideology ensconced in the Kamakura-Kyoto Five Mountains (五山 gozan) system of Rinzai temples became central under samurai rule.
The Shadow Side of the Single Practice Buddhist Revolution
The immanentalism that affirmed the agency of the common people had, predictably, its shadow side. It tended to re-affirm the this-worldly, secular tendencies of Japanese culture that erode the universal ethics used to transcend clan and tribal interests. This is perhaps most clearly seen in the rapid rise of the Jodo Shin sect among the agricultural classes in this period. One of the core theological problems for Shin is that in abandoning almost all the traditional practices of Buddhism, including the ordained and lay precepts of daily life, Jodo Shin quickly became prone to adopting more traditional or indigenous forms of Japanese secular life and morality. Kakunyo 覺如 (1270-1351)—Shinran’s great-grandson and the first principal leader of the Jodo Shin sect—explained in Correcting False Faith (改邪抄 Kaija-sho) that since the five base precepts of all Buddhists (Skt. panca-sila 五戒 go-kai)of neither killing, stealing, lying, engaging in harmful sexual relations, or taking intoxicants were equal to the more common Japanese morals of benevolence, righteousness, courtesy, wisdom, and faith, Shin followers should simply cultivate the latter.[75]
The other complication of rejecting monastic celibacy is that the Shin sect from the very beginning fell into power struggles from the tendency of succession to go through familial and blood ties, eventually creating a clannish system of governance and the worship of Shin head priests as clan deities in spite of Shinran’s admonishment that “I, Shinran, have no disciples to be called mine.”[76] These sectarian tendencies are also found in the other Kamakura Buddhist sects: in the Nichiren sect, which quickly factionalized around the six appointed successors of Nichiren, and the Soto Zen sect with its complicated system of revolving abbots.[77] The factionalization in Soto Zen led to the hoarding of sacred texts and the development of secret initiation documents (kirigami) to enhance the prestige of a particular temple or faction.[78] Nakamura Hajime, in explaining this point, notes, “It is not the difference in the religious faith or doctrine but merely such specific factors of human relationship as the inheritance of the master’s ‘endowments’ that account for the split of the religious school into multitudinous sects and factions.”[79]
This was, and remains today, one of the shadow aspects of the emphasis on the single practice of the Kamakura Buddhist movements. In simplifying Buddhist thought and practice for the benefit of the common person, some of the integrated richness of the tradition was lost along with a greater tendency towards sectarianism or factionalism—a common trait in the clannish mentality of Japanese culture. Buddhism in general is united around the Three Trainings that integrate ethics/virtue (sila), meditation (samadhi), and learning/wisdom (prajna), and in the wider East Asian Mahayana world, the Zen, Pure Land, and Lotus Sutra teachings are studied and practiced together. However, Japanese Buddhism eventually carved the Mahayana teachings and practices into mutually exclusive traditions.
Ideological Struggle based on a Greater Spiritual Vision: The Shin State & the Lotus Sutra
In the Introduction, we noted that in axialized civilizations, universal ideology had created loyalties and communities that superseded or transcended national and ethnic ones; for example, the role of Buddhism as dharma under Ashoka and its spread into Central Asia during its first 500 years or the role of the Christian Church in medieval Europe as well as its fall to the secular ideologies of human rights, democracy, and socialism. In this vein, Nakamura Hajime makes a critical point about Japanese culture in that:
We find only a few cases in which sacrifices of life were made by the Japanese for the sake of something universal, something that transcends a particular human nexus, such as academic truth or the arts. And if we exclude the persecutions of the True Pure Land [Jodo Shin] sect, the Hokke [Nichiren] sect, and Christianity, cases of dying for religious faith are exceptional phenomena. Sacrifice of all for the sake of truth, when it went contrary to the intentions of the ruler, was even regarded as evil.[80]
He further explains that the Japanese emphasis on a limited social nexus and intuitive rather than logical thinking makes them less critical and hence confrontational. This translates to a type of social change in which the form is altered but not the internal logic, and thus we notice the lack of ideologically driven revolutions based on universal forms of thought in Japanese history.[81]
The possible exceptions to this point that Nakamura highlights are all movements that occurred during the Muromachi period: the peasant rebellions of the Jodo Shin sect, the rise of merchant class together with the Nichiren sect, and the brief flowering of Christianity in southern Japan. The first and most prominent of these movements in terms of an actual social revolution was the peasant rebellion movement of the Jodo Shin sect called ikko-ikki 一向一揆. In many ways, it was the logical conclusion to the revolutionary theology of Honen established in the late Heian and based around not only the total rejection of previous Buddhist norms but, as importantly, the ken-mitsu social system that had laid claim to those norms. As we have noted, Jodo Shin made great inroads among the common people, because it was propagated not from above by a clerical elite but by lay believers and had an organizational structure that resembled those of the self-governing peasant communities. However, as also noted, Shin eventually established a cult of veneration of clerical leaders based on the blood lineage of Shinran. This reaches its culmination in the figure of Rennyo 蓮如 (1415-99), who became the 8th patriarch of the Jodo Shin sect in 1458. Shortly afterwards in 1465, the still active militarized personnel of the Tendai center on Mt. Hiei stormed Kyoto and destroyed the increasingly powerful Shin base at the Higashiyama Hongan-ji Temple. This pushed Rennyo to move up the coast of the Japan Sea to an area called Yoshizaki in present day Ishikawa, where a small city of Jodo Shin followers had been established. This is where the beginnings of the ikko-ikki movement emerged. In 1488, they led a peasant rebellion in nearby Kaga overthrowing the local lord and taking control of this region for the next 100 years.[82]
Paralleling the rise of the Shin sect, the Nichiren sect came to prominence in Kyoto among the newly emerging merchant class under Nichizo 日像 (1269-1342), the disciple of Nichiro 日朗 (1245–1320), one of Nichiren’s six appointed successors. With continual growth and the establishment of sub-lineages in the capital, Nichiren followers became the target of the dreaded sohei on Mt. Hiei. As such, they became increasingly embroiled in politics, and by the 1390s, the Kenpon Hokke sub-sect 顕本法華宗 began issuing official“rebukes” known as kokka-kango 国家諫暁 of the Ashikaga military government in the style of Nichiren during his days in Kamakura.[83] By 1460, 21 different sub-sects had created a form of de-facto rule over Kyoto. Further drawing on the militant precedents set by Nichiren, such as the use of armed guards to protect himself against assassins, Nichiren based merchants in Kyoto developed merchant militias (法華一揆 hokke-ikki) to defend themselves against attacks by both the sohei and the ikko-ikki as it spread into the capital.[84] Eventually, many of the 21 Kyoto based temples were built up as armed fortresses to serve as headquarters for daimyo. The first important hokke-ikki was a campaign in alliance with daimyo and forces from Mt. Hiei against the presence of the Jodo Shin in Kyoto. They led 30-40,000 troops against the Yamashina Hongan-ji in 1532, completely destroying it. However, in 1536 the Mt. Hiei forces turned against them and burned southern Kyoto where the merchant classes lived, expelling the 21 Nichiren sects from Kyoto, of which only 15 had returned by 1545.[85]
The third ideological force of this period was Christianity, introduced to Japan by the Jesuit Francis Xavier in 1549. Within forty years, it is estimated that 2% of Japan (roughly 150,000 people) had become Christian with many daimyo converting in hopes of gaining favor with the increasing number of western traders. Like Jodo Shin, its teachings connected with lives of the peasant classes and their struggles against the ken-mitsu and zen-mitsu systems. Like the Nichiren sects, they held a strident and singular obedience to an authority that transcended traditional Japanese loyalties to lord, clan, nation, and emperor. As formidable competitors, the new foreign missionaries, unsurprisingly, found the Nichiren groups the most to their disliking.[86] The Christian movement also found an ally in the rising figure of the great warlord Oda Nobunaga (1534-82) who saw it as a way to overcome to persistent menace of the various militarized Buddhist sects and their communities.
Nobunaga, however, was no Christian. Perhaps, most closely aligned with Confucian sentiments, he felt no fear or awe of the kami and buddhas, developing his own personal cult of divinity and proclaiming himself the ruler of the world.[87] This fearlessness was manifested in his total destruction of the sacred precincts of the Enryaku-ji Temple and Mt Hiei in 1571, followed by the submission of the other ken-mitsu powers of Mt. Koya and Kofuku-ji at Nara. The Shin movement proved to be the most difficult of campaigns with a number of failed attacks beginning in 1576 on their new center in Sakai, modern-day Osaka. A blockade finally brought the Shin fortress to its knees in 1580 and the end of the ikko-ikki movement.[88] Nobunaga would not be able to realize his own vision as a divine ruler (deva-raja), taking his own life through seppuku after being surrounded in an assassination plot. However, his successors, the powerful warlords Hideyoshi Toyotomi (1536-98) and Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616), would finish the work of tearing down the ken-mitsu, zen-mitsu, and ikki systems and ushering in a period of peaceful and severely regulated state Buddhism.[89]
The lasting and ongoing question, then, is what is the legacy of the Kamakura Buddhist movement? Was it a true axial one that empowered the common people of Japan to find not only spiritual liberation in this life and the next but also a socio-political liberation in the throwing off of tribalized forms of sacralized power and injustice? Or was it merely a flash of insight that quickly became overwhelmed by the deeper cultural systems of esoteric rites for this-worldly benefit (thaumaturgy), veneration of ancestors and other forms of hierarchized authority, and tribalized ethics that honor the defense, usually in violent ways, of limited forms of community? From the vantage point of the Meiji Restoration and the descent into Japanese imperialism and world war, the answer seems surely the latter. Japanese Buddhism’s recent embrace of various forms of socially engaged Buddhism, however, may offer a dissenting opinion and the hope that the legacy of the Kamakura Buddhist revolution still offers a roadmap for social change based on egalitarian ethics that encourage tolerance and non-violent conflict resolution. In the spirit of Dogen, the understanding that the language, conceptual thought, and ideologies can be vehicles for the constant creation of buddha enlightenment gives us hope that such a movement is possible.
Part V: The Brahmanistic and Confucian Turns of Buddhism & the Tokugawa Era (1603-1868)
The Reigning in of Buddhist Power
As noted by Kuroda Toshio, the Tokugawa era begins an extended period of the marginalization of Buddhism in Japanese society, which we could say has continued up to the present day. Countervailing cultural movements had already begun in the Muromachi period, which Yoshiro Tamura characterized as a “triumph of the secular” in which “a life-affirming culture”—as opposed to the Kamakura era ethos of mappo—“with humanistic values” was popularized among the common people. This “secular” culture is seen in the shedding of overt Buddhist colorings to popular art and culture and the increase in Confucian and Shinto ideological themes, such as harmony and sincerity. The first steps to reign in the still formidable loyalties of the various Buddhist centers by the Tokugawa was the ending of various special privileges they had accrued over the centuries, especially through the seizing of vast tracts of land over which they had ruled. The Tokugawa created a multiple head temple system with branch temples for all Buddhist sects as a way to dilute and control their power. Doctrinal study was also strongly emphasized to turn the focus of the priests inward towards sectarian minutia and away from social and political engagement. Most of these new regulations were issued in the first years of the Tokugawa regime under Ieyasu himself between 1601-15, with total uniformity applied to all sects by 1665.[90] These regulations were not only used to reign in the power of the massive Buddhist orders but also to quell the rise of Christianity and the influence of the West during this time. In 1613, Ieyasu issued the Order to Expel Christian Priests (伴天連追放令 Ba-te-ren Tsui-ho-rei).[91] This was followed by the execution of 120 missionaries and converts in 1622, and the final, comprehensive ban on Christianity in 1638. Three years earlier in 1635, the Tokugawa government issued the Closed Country Edict prohibiting Japanese from leaving the country and preventing foreigners from entering, thus ushering in more than two hundred years of cultural isolation during the height of Asia’s encounter with colonial Europe.
1638 is a critical watershed less for the banning of Christianity and more for the enforced system of temple registration that made every Japanese register at a local Buddhist temple. This system, called the tera-uke seido 寺請制度 or danka seido 檀家制度, enabled the Tokugawa to restrict movement throughout the country by making residence change almost impossible and to police citizens through using temples and monks as government officials. The tera-uke seido was made into a nationwide system through an explosion in the construction of Buddhist temples, estimated at some 13,000 in the Kamakura period to some 470,000 in the Tokugawa.[92] The system not only helped to weed out Christians by forcing them to pledge allegiance to a local Buddhist temple but also helped stamp out the remaining Buddhist sects that refused to submit to controls over their doctrine and institutional set-up, such us underground Pure Land groups and the Fuju-fuse 不受不施派 and Hiden 悲田派 sub-sects of the Nichiren movement.[93] Through these developments, the role and attitude of the Buddhist priest shifted greatly during the Tokugawa period. From the earliest days of the hijiri phenomena in the Nara and Heian periods through the grassroots spiritual revolution of the Kamakura and political revolution of the Muromachi, many Buddhist priests had come to support the people in life and death, living among them and leading them. In the Tokugawa, the other historical thread of monks acting as heads of feudal domains that oppressed the common citizen, as seen in the ken-mitsu and zen-mitsu systems, was updated to the confines of the Tokugawa military state. Buddhist sects and temples became fused to their pre-existing class alliances (e.g. Zen for the samurai, Pure Land for the farmers, Nichiren for the merchants, Tendai and Shingon for the aristocracy) in the institutionalization of a rigid class society based on Confucian teachings called the shi-no-ko-sho士農工商.[94]
The Birth of Funeral Buddhism and the New State Theology
In tandem with these institutional changes, a critical shift in the culture of Japanese Buddhism took place in the Tokugawa era, away from the liberation theologies of the Kamakura to a systemization of ancestor veneration as state ideology that sacralized the new institutionalized class system and top-down authority of the Tokugawa. As noted at the very beginning of this historical survey, the early Japanese adapted various Chinese Buddhist concepts around the veneration of elders and ancestors to their own forms of clan worship—such as the teaching of repaying benefits to parents, all sentient beings, rulers, and the Three Treasures (ho-on). In tandem with the growth of the Kamakura Buddhist movements, all Buddhist sects began to develop funerary rituals for common citizens during the Kamakura-Muromachi periods through a combination of local, indigenous traditions and Buddhist ideas and practices.[95] This expansion included taking the Chinese practice of holding memorial services for the dead on the 49th day, 100th day, 1st anniversary, and 3rd anniversary and extending it to the 7th, 13th, 17th, 25th, 33rd, and 50th anniversaries[96]—a system that is still observed today and keeps Buddhist priests and their families economically viable.
The Zen sects in particular were important for developing the foundations of this system and what is now referred to in a pejorative way as Funeral Buddhism (葬式仏教 Soshiki Bukkyo). In their wholesale importation of Song era Chan, the Japanese Zen sects performed funerals for their monastics based on Song monastic regulations that involved the recitation of the monastic precepts as a way to link the power of themonastic precepts (vinaya) with future salvation after death. However, from the period of Saicho, the division between ordained and lay had always been nebulous. As such, Hojo Tokimune, who built the great Rinzai temple Engaku-ji in Kamakura, received ordination on his death bed in 1284 by Chinese master Wuxue Zuyuan (無学祖元 Mugaku Sogen) and subsequently received a full monastic Zen funeral. This created a precedent so that by the 14th century some regional lords who had received lay ordination before death were given monastic funerals.[97]
These trends were further developed by the Soto Zen sect as it sought to spread amongst the masses, especially under the impetus of the disciples of Gasan 峨山 (1276-1366), the abbot of Soji-ji 総持寺 on the Noto peninsula and the major center of Soto Zen in the medieval period.[98] Faced with the challenges of adopting the stricter and more monastic style of Dogen’s vision of liberation through seated meditation to the common people as the Pure Land and Nichiren sects had successfully done with their single invocation mantras, the Soto sect began to develop more popularized forms of worship, principally based on lay ordination and funeral services. By the 15th century, Soto Zen was conducting mass ordinations to introduce Zen teachings, promote new temples, and popularize funerals for lay people, including the ordination of the dead. In the end, ordination became more of establishing a “karmic link” to Buddhism rather than a way for people to commit themselves to the non-violent (ahimsa) ethics that form the foundation of all the precepts. In this way, people could become devout Buddhists and take lay ordination but remain as warriors and not follow the precepts[99]—a situation that is not uncommon in any Buddhist nation in the world.
The “logic” of this fusion of ancestor worship and Buddhism, which still exists as the mainstream practice of Japanese Buddhists today, works as follows: When a family member dies, a series of Buddhist funeral ceremonies including a wake service (通夜 tsuya) are held. During these, the deceased is traditionally given tonsure with the shaving of their head and being dressed in Buddhist pilgrim robes for the journey onward, though this practice is increasingly skipped today. They are also given an ordination name (戒名 kaimyo), which in the Tokugawa period became connected with class as well as outcaste, the length and complexity becoming in the modern era open to price ranking and a major source of temple profit. Like the Catholic Church’s practice of indulgence, the ordination name and the complete set of funerary rites with connected memorial dates spanning over fifty years guarantees the so-called “attainment of Buddhahood” (成仏 jobutsu) of the deceased and their enshrinement as a “buddha” (仏 hotoke). Examining the way a typical Japanese Buddhist would use and understand these terms, the “attainment of Buddhahood” is more understood as the attainment of Amitabha’s Pure Land or the more vague sense of an “ancestral land” (高天原 takamaga-hara), the abode of the heavenly gods (天津神 amatsu-kami). Often depicted as located up in the sky, this land is believed to be connected to the Earth by the “Floating Bridge of Heaven” (天野浮橋 ama-no uki-hashi). The status of a hotoke refers more to a term of ancient Japanese origin that is better translated as “ancestral spirit” rather than a buddha. Kuroda Toshio summarizes the development of this system for all Buddhist sects in the Tokugawa:
Buddhism, bereft of its original logic and depth of belief, became a hollow, popularized version of itself that proposed a generally easy realization of Buddhahood after death, leaving it little alternative than to turn into “funeral Buddhism”; this, however, amounted to the subordination of religion to politics…The soul that attains Buddhahood (成仏 jobutsu) after death must be seen, however, as in a far lower spiritual state than that of a person who achieves jobutsu in its original sense of becoming an awakened being and realizing the dharma… [This] was not a manifestation of respect towards the dead; it was, rather, nothing but a false consciousness created by the political exploitation of religion.[100]
We could see this systemization of veneration as the Tokugawa military government using Buddhism to sacralize its rule as had been done in the ken-mitsu and zen-mitsu systems. However, as Kuroda points out, this new form of Funeral Buddhism was a hollowed-out version of Buddhism. In its place, a more Confucian system of ancestor veneration was inserted with the Buddhist priest acting more as a Brahmanical ritualist. Buddhist temples and denominations remained intact giving the appearance that Buddhism was still forming a basis for the social order, but its previous forms that had been used to sacralize rule became increasingly unimportant in Tokugawa society. Within this shell of Buddhism emerged an increasing emphasis on the principles and ethics of Confucianism, or rather Neo-Confucianism. In China, Neo-Confucianism had developed as a more sophisticated system of traditional Confucian teachings in response to the arrival and flourishing of Indian Buddhism’s highly developed system of metaphysical outlooks coupled with practical ethics.
While Confucian influences in Japan are evident as early as Prince Shotoku’s Seventeen Article Constitution and even before, Neo-Confucianism did not emerge as an important cultural force until the end of the Muromachi period. Its teachings were, ironically, spread by Zen Buddhist monks who had brought them back from their studies in China and found them useful in teaching their samurai class devotees.[101] During this period, the infamous “Way of the Warrior” (bushido), which was first conceptualized under the influence of Zen Buddhism in the late Kamakura period, became increasingly imbued with the core Confucian ethical norms of the five social virtues (五常 go-jo) and the five hierarchical relationships (五倫 go-rin). The former—consisting of benevolence 仁, righteousness 義, propriety 理 (a.k.a. filial piety), wisdom 智 and loyalty/trustworthiness (信)—defined the moral and ethical comportment towards the people in one’s life, such as between ruler and subject, father and son, elder brother and younger brother, husband and wife, friend and friend. This system of ethics was much more suited to the needs of the military class, and in turn the military government, for maintaining loyalty and a hierarchical social order, and it clearly contrasted the ethical thrust of the Kamakura Buddhist movements, which had instructed the common people to discover their own salvation through loyalty only to such transcendental powers as Amida Buddha or the Lotus Sutra.
For the city commoners of the Tokugawa era along with the rural farmers and fisherfolk, the more secular concepts and values of Neo-Confucianism were less obvious and operative. The faith-based practices of Buddhism and local Shinto customs had stronger influence on family customs and human relationships. The highly patriarchal Confucian family system and its ethics were a more conscious element of not only the Tokugawa military class but also great landowners and merchants along with the nobility.[102] As we will explore later, this sort of basic two-class system has endured into the modern era in the fundamental urban elite and rural working-class division. Ultimately, the fundamental tenets of the five relationships and five social virtues continued to serve as important tools for social cohesion and control for not only the Tokugawa military government but onward to the new Meiji nation-state, the post-Meiji military state, and the post-war bureaucratic state. In this way, Confucianism, or rather Neo-Confucianism, has not so much created the ethical outlook of modern Japanese as much as “articulate the values by which Japanese society works”.[103]
Karmic Taint, Veneration of Authority, and the Japanese Caste System
In the opening section on the early formation of Buddhism in Japan, we saw that the Japanese, as a mountainous, island culture, have tended to value more localized or tribal ethics based on taboo and taint (kega-re) over more universal or transcendental ethics based on sin and karma. This distinction mirrors Buddhism’s own differentiation from Vedic Brahmanism, which developed a four-fold caste system plus an additional outcaste level based on notions of cosmic and ritual purity. As we have seen above, the Tokugawa were able to legitimize an institutionalized class system through solidifying pre-existing class alliances with certain Buddhist sects and tying it to a vertical structure of power based on the veneration of ancestors and Neo-Confucian respect for authority. While there is a long history in Japan of social discrimination against slaves, lepers, criminals, strangers, residents of undesirable areas, and so forth,[104] Tokugawa Buddhism took ancient Japanese notions of kega-re to a new level by fusing them with so-called Buddhist teachings of karma. Although Japan’s class system of military leaders, farmers, artisans, and merchants was not based on ritual taboos as with the Indian caste system, more clearly articulated notions of kega-re developed under Buddhist auspices to support patriarchy and create a clearly defined outcaste population called Burakumin 部落民—literally “people of the village”, but sometimes also referred to as eta (穢多 “those full of defilement”) or hi-nin (非人 “non-humans”).
The Soto Zen sect provides again a very salient example of the distortions of the Tokugawa period. It can be found that even before the implementation of the temple registration system, Soto Zen teachers already had developed special funeral rituals for people of outcaste status as well as for victims of mental illness, leprosy, and other socially unaccepted diseases. These people were referred to as “non-human” (hinin), and Soto Zen created a special form of the aforementioned kirigami ritual texts for them, which instead of supporting the salvation of the deceased rather described rites to sever all karmic connections between them and local people.[105] Earlier on in this chapter, we noted how Shinto with its traditional taboos against blood and impurity allowed Buddhism to take over the work of dealing with the dead in Japan, because in theory Buddhists have only concern for mental purity not physical. Japanese Buddhism, however, has long standing practices of discriminating against women for their supposed physical impurity in menstruation and childbirth. The great Buddhist mountains of Japan, such as Mt. Hiei and Mt. Koya, forbade the entry into the mountain by any woman up until modern times. Soto Zen developed a variety of misogynic rituals in which women were taught that menstrual blood pollutes the earth and offends the spirits dooming them to a karmic destiny in the special hell containing a “blood pool lake” (血盆池 ketsubon i-ke). Soto Zen monks were, of course, the only ones who could save them from such a fate through the bequeathing of a special talisman and a specially consecrated copy of the Blood Pool Sutra (血盆經 Ketsubon-kyo), another creation of the Chinese Buddhist tradition.[106] As mentioned, Zen monks, especially Rinzai ones, also began importing Neo-Confucian ethical norms that promoted respect to authority. The Neo-Confucian teachings of Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130-1200) became particularly favorable to the Tokugawa establishment for their emphasis on the eternality of social hierarchy. The strong emphasis on the five relationships and the five social virtues created a hermetic container for human relationships that the individual was not to go beyond.
With the development of such theologies, Tokugawa Buddhism had the cultural means to further institutionalize the structure of a rigid class system, which formed the longest period of unbroken rule in Japanese history. One of the most insidious systems for keeping track of and keeping in place class distinctions was the creation of death registries or necrologies (過去帳 kako-cho), which recorded the posthumous names (kaimyo) given to individuals after death and the dates for the necessary memorial services to be performed in their name. The length and sophistication of these names would denote social status and could be determined by a variety of ambiguous criteria including family lineage, wealth, social position, and donations made to the temple or sect.[107] These death registries were not only used to denote high status but also low status, such as regulations that former Christians and their descendants down to the fifth generation could not be registered in the standard temple registries but had to be recorded separately in a book known as “off the registry” (帳外れ cho-hazu-re).[108] Sometimes necrology entries were more explicitly discriminatory with outcastes being labeled as sendara 旅陀羅, the Japanese transliteration of the Sanskrit word candala, who are none other than the Untouchable class of the Vedic caste system. In other cases, the Chinese character for “beast” (畜 chiku) was used. These terms have also been found carved on family tombstones, leaving a permanent public record of the social status of those families.
These practices were thought be left in the dustbin of the Tokugawa period, yet the records and sometimes still secret practices remained intact until the latter part of the 20th century. As we will examine in detail in a later chapter, the exposure of these practices to the modern public further tainted their perception of Buddhism as an “archaic” and useless remnant of the past. The persistent inability of the traditional sects to pro-actively reform the tera-uka system, which still persists despite being delinked from state legal norms, is the legacy of the Tokugawa period that still haunts Japanese Buddhism today.
[1] Eisenstadt, S.N. Japanese Civilization: A Comparative View. (London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 13
[2] Ibid., p. 13.
[3] Ibid., p. 420.
[4] Ibid., p. 423.
[5] Ibid., p. 15.
[6] “tribal” is not used in a pejorative sense but in a descriptive one to explain, as Nakamura Hajime does, Japan’s tendency towards a “limited human nexus” of social relations. Nakamura, Hajime. Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples India-China-Tibet-Japan. Revised English Translation Edited by Philip P. Wiener (University of Hawaii Press, 1964), p. 521.
[7] Kuroda, Toshio “The Development of the Kenmitsu System as Japan’s Medieval Orthodoxy.” Translated by James C. Dobbins. In Japanese Journal of Religious Studies. 1996. Vol. 23, No.3-4, pp. 236-39.
[8] Kasahara, Kazuo. A History of Japanese Religion. Trans. Paul McCarthy & Gaynor Sekimori. (Tokyo: Kosei Publishing, 2001), p. 61.
[9] Ibid., pp. 531-35.
[10] Ibid., pp. 543-45.
[11] Watts, Jonathan, Ed. Rethinking Karma: The Dharma of Social Justice. (Bangkok: International Network of Engaged Buddhists, 2014). pp. 19-20.
[12] Hakamaya Noriaki. “Thoughts on the Ideological Background of Social Discrimination”. Tran. Jamie Hubbard. In Pruning the Bodhi Tree: The Storm over Critical Buddhism. Eds. Jamie Hubbard & Paul L. Swanson (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), pp. 341-42.
[13] Kasahara. A History of Japanese Religion. p. 47.
[14] Nakamura. Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples. p. 578.
[15] Ibid., p. 518.
[16] For example, the guidelines for a moral king (dhammaraja) in the Cakkavatti Sutta, for the householder in the Singalovada Sutta (D.iii. 180–93), and for republican congresses in the Mahaparinibbana Sutta (D.ii.74).
[17] Obeyesekere, Gananath. Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), p. 113.
[18] Watts. Rethinking Karma. pp. 18-19.
[19] Kasahara. A History of Japanese Religion. p. 59.
[20] http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/ps/japan/shotoku.pdf
[21] Nakamura. Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples. p. 413.
[22] 六和敬 roku wa-kyo in the Digital Dictionary of Buddhism. http://www.buddhism-dict.net/ddb/
[23] Matsumoto. “Buddhism and the Kami: Against Japanism”. In Pruning the Bodhi Tree. p. 363.
[24] Nakamura. Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples. p. 498.
[25] The Srimala Sutra (勝鬘經 Shoman-gyo) is also a key text in the tathagata-garbha and buddha-naturetradition which forms the basis for the teaching of original enlightenment (本覚 hongaku). Hongaku became the dominant feature of Heian Era esoteric Buddhism and ultimately the entire Japanese Buddhist tradition as well as the object of contemporary criticism as a doctrine of authoritarianism and social discrimination.
[26] Kasahara. A History of Japanese Religion. p. 59.
[27] Nakamura. Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples. p. 427.
[28] Kuroda. “The Development of the Kenmitsu System as Japan’s Medieval Orthodoxy.” p. 236.
[29] Ibid., p. 245.
[30] Ibid., p. 246.
[31] Ibid., p. 240.
[32]Insei 院政 means literally “temple administration” and refers to rule by retired emperors who adjudicated between the Fujiwaras and the rising warrior class from cloistered temples. A retired emperor who entered a Buddhist monastic community became a “cloistered emperor” (太上法皇 Daijo Ho-o). Wikipedia. This marks a further stage in the Japanese governing system of separating authority (in this case, the present emperor) with power (the insei emperor).
[33] Kuroda. Toshio. “The Imperial Law and the Buddhist Law.” Trans. Jacqueline I. Stone. In Japanese Journal of Religious Studies. 1996. Vol. 23, No.3-4. pp. 275-76, 280.
[34] Honji-suijaku is a concept developed from Chinese Tiantai’s interpretation of the Lotus Sutra which taught of the Eternal Buddha as origin and his manifestations. Williams, Paul. Mahayana Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations. (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 156. Suijaku 垂迹 in the Digital Dictionary of Buddhism. http://www.buddhism-dict.net/ddb/
[35] Watts. Rethinking Karma. p. 31
[36] Kuroda. “The Development of the Kenmitsu System as Japan’s Medieval Orthodoxy.” pp. 250-51.
[37] Kasahara. A History of Japanese Religion. p. 111.
[38] Kuroda. “The Development of the Kenmitsu System as Japan’s Medieval Orthodoxy.” p. 262-64.
[39] Sueki, Fumihiko. “A Reexamination of the Kenmitsu Taisei Theory.” In Japanese Journal of Religious Studies. 1996. Vol. 23, No. 3-4, p. 258.
[40] Stone, Jacqueline I. “Placing Nichiren in the ‘Big Picture’: Some Ongoing Issues in Scholarship.” In Japanese Journal of Religious Studies. 1999. Vol. 26, No. 3-4, p. 397.
[41] Bodiford, William M. Soto Zen in Medieval Japan. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993), p. 167.
[42] Kasahara. A History of Japanese Religion. p. 79.
[43] I use the term “militarized Buddhists” instead of the blanket term “warrior-monks” (僧兵 sohei), which was not in use at this time and is the creation of scholars in the Edo period. Adolphson. The Teeth and Claws of the Buddha. p. 13.
[44] Kuroda, Toshio. Temple and Shrine Forces: Another Medieval Society (寺社勢力もう一つ中世の社会 Jisha sei-ryoku: Mo-hitotsu chusei-no shakai). (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1980), pp. 32, 34. Kuroda, Toshio. “Buddhism and Society in the Medieval Estate System.” Trans. Suzanne Gay. In Japanese Journal of Religious Studies. 1996. Vol. 23, No.3-4, p. 319.
[45] Adolphson. The Teeth and Claws of the Buddha. p. 8.
[46] Ibid., p. 114.
[47] Ibid., p. 259.
[48] Kasahara. A History of Japanese Religion. p. 97.
[49] Kuroda. “The Development of the Kenmitsu System as Japan’s Medieval Orthodoxy.” p. 257.
[50] Ibid., pp. 260-61.
[51] Ibid., p. 314.
[52] Marra, Michele. “The Development of Mappo Thought in Japan (I)”. In Japanese Journal of Religious Studies. 1988. Vol. 15, No. 1, p. 21.
[53] Marra, Michele. “The Development of Mappo Thought in Japan (II)”. In Japanese Journal of Religious Studies. 1988. Vol. 15, No. 4, p. 288.
[54] Machida, Soho. Renegade Monk: Honen and Japanese Pure Land Buddhism. Ed. & Trans. Ioannis Mentzas. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
[55] Honen’s Senchakushu, pp. 14-15.
[56] Honen. “Question 4: Repeat at least Ten Thousand Times”in “One Hundred Forty-five Questions and Answers” (一百四十五箇条問答 Ippyaku-shijugo-kajo mondo) in Honen the Buddhist Saint: His Life and Teaching. Trans. Harper Havelock Coates & Ryugaku Ishizuka. (Kyoto: Chion-in Temple, 1925), p. 423. Now being re-edited and re-published by the Jodo Shu Research Institute in Tokyo.
[57] Stone, Jacqueline I. Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003), pp. 87-88.
[58] Williams. Mahayana Buddhism. pp. 113.
[59] Loy, David R. “Language Against Its Own Mystifications: Deconstruction in Nagarjuna and Dogen”. In Philosophy East & West. 1999. Vol. 49, No. 3. p. 256.
[60] Williams. Mahayana Buddhism. pp. 114-15.
[61] Stone. Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism. p. 88.
[62] This concept is found in the aforementioned Srimala Sutra (勝鬘經 Shoman-gyo) chosen by Shotoku as one of the key Buddhist texts for the founding of the Japanese nation and also a key text in the tathagata-garbha and buddha-nature tradition, which forms the basis for the teaching of original enlightenment (hongaku). It appears often in the works of the founders of the Chinese Tiantai (Tendai) tradition, Zhiyi and Zhanran.
[63] Stone, Jacqueline I. “Nichiren’s Activist Heirs: Soka Gakkai, Rissho Koseikai, Nipponzan Myohoji.” In Action Dharma: New Studies in Engaged Buddhism. Eds. Christopher Queen, Charles Prebish, & Damien Keown. (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), p. 65.
[64] Nakamura. Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples. p. 361.
[65] Blum, Mark L. “Never Die Alone: Shonen as Intersubjective Experience”. In Never Die Alone: Death as Birth in Pure Land Buddhism. Eds. Jonathan S. Watts & Yoshiharu Tomatsu. (Tokyo: Jodo Shu Press, 2008), pp. 4, 8.
[66] Ibid., pp. 10-11.
[67] Collcutt. Five Mountains. pp. 59-61.
[68] Stone. “Placing Nichiren in the ‘Big Picture’”. p. 386.
[69] Stone. “Placing Nichiren in the ‘Big Picture’”. p. 388.
[70] Ibid., p. 389.
[71] Ibid., pp. 394-95.
[72] Kuroda. “Buddhism and Society in the Medieval Estate System.” pp. 304-05. Bodiford. Soto Zen in Medieval Japan. pp. 112-13.
[73] Davis. Japanese Religion and Society. pp. 28-34.
[74] Kuroda. “Buddhism and Society in the Medieval Estate System.” p. 312. Bodiford. Soto Zen in Medieval Japan. pp. 112-13.
[75] Tamura. Japanese Buddhism: A Cultural History. pp. 122-23.
[76] Nakamura. Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples. p. 482.
[77] Bodiford. Soto Zen in Medieval Japan. p. 128.
[78] Ibid.,p. 134.
[79] Nakamura. Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples. p. 484.
[80] Ibid., p. 414.
[81] Ibid., p. 401.
[82] Tamura. Japanese Buddhism: A Cultural History. p.124.
[83] Stone, Jacqueline I. “When Disobedience Is Filial and Resistance Is Loyal: The Lotus Sutra and Social Obligations in the Medieval Nichiren Tradition”. In A Buddhist Kaleidoscope: Essays on the Lotus Sutra. Ed. Gene Reeves. (Tokyo, Kosei Publishing Co., 2002), p. 277.
[84] Tamura. Japanese Buddhism: A Cultural History. pp. 125-26.
[85] Matsunaga. Foundation of Japanese Buddhism: Vol. II. p. 178.
[86] Tamura. Japanese Buddhism: A Cultural History. p.141. In this way, one wonders that the very low percentage in modern Japan of Christians, especially evangelicals, as in South Korea, may be due to the incredible popularity of lay based Nichiren movements during this time.
[87] Tamura. Japanese Buddhism: A Cultural History. p. 120.
[88] Matsunaga. Foundation of Japanese Buddhism: Vol. II. pp. 122-23.
[89] Tamura. Japanese Buddhism: A Cultural History. pp. 128-29.
[90] Kasahara. A History of Japanese Religion. p. 337.
[91] Tamamuro, Fumio. “Local Society and the Temple-Parishioner Relationship within the Bakufu’s Governance Structure”. In Japanese Journal of Religious Studies. 2001. Vol. 28, No. 3-4, p. 266.
[92] Kitagawa, Joseph M. On Understanding Japanese Religion. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 164.
[93] Kasahara. A History of Japanese Religion. p. 334. Tamamuro. “Local Society and the Temple-Parishioner Relationship within the Bakufu’s Governance Structure”. p. 265.
[94] Kasahara. A History of Japanese Religion. p. 334. The shi-no-ko-sho 士農工商 refers to samurai (士 shi), farmers (農 no), artisans (工 ko), and merchants (商 sho). Tokugawa society was actually more diverse with an aristocracy that was nominally at the top of the system, an outcaste class engaged in “polluting” professions, and a sizeable clergy class of both Buddhist and Shinto priests.
[95] Nara, Yasuaki. “The Soto Zen School in Modern Japan”. https://www.thezensite.com/ZenEssays/DogenStudies/Soto_Zen_in_Japan.html
[96] Nakamura. Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples. p. 425.
[97] Bodiford. Soto Zen in Medieval Japan. pp. 185-94.
[98] Ibid., p. 108.
[99] Ibid., p. 184.
[100] Kuroda, Toshio. “The World of Spirit Pacification: Issues of State and Religion” Trans. Allan Grapard. In Japanese Journal of Religious Studies. 1996. Vol. 23, No. 3-4, p. 343.
[101] Tucker, John. “Japanese Confucian Philosophy”. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Edward N. Zalta. Spring 2018 Edition.
[102] Smith, Robert J. “The Japanese (Confucian) Family: The Tradition from the Bottom Up”. In Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity. Ed. Tu Wei-Ming. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 169.
[103] Ibid., p. 171.
[104] Bodiford, William. “Zen and the Art of Religious Prejudice: Efforts to Reform a Tradition of Social Discrimination”. In Japanese Journal of Religious Studies. 1996. Vol. 23, No. 1-2, p. 14.
[105] Ibid., p. 14.
[106] Ibid., p. 15.
[107] Tamamuro. “Local Society and the Temple-Parishioner Relationship within the Bakufu’s Governance Structure”. p. 273.
[108] Bodiford. “Zen and the Art of Religious Prejudice”. p. 8.
Contemporary Buddhism in Japan & Asia 