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Civil War and Buddhism versus Shinto

Buddhism may have arrived in Japan earlier, but the commonly believed time of its arrival in Japan was around the mid-500s, when the Korean king of Paekche was fighting the king of neighboring Silla and wished to ally himself with Japan. The king of Paekche presented Japan's emperor with an image of the Buddha and some sacred Buddhist writings, and he described Buddhism as the religion of the civilized world. The leader of the aristocratic clan called the Mononobe, who led the emperor's military, opposed joining Paekche against Silla. So too did the clan whose leader was in charge of religious ritual - the Nakatomi. Both of them were opposed to the importation of Buddhism, believing that Buddhism would be an affront to the traditional gods of the emperor.  It was the duty of the Nakatomi to perform religious rituals, known as Shintoism, at court. And if  Buddha had powers superior to all other deities as the head of the Nakatomi family believed that Buddhists claimed, then Buddhism contradicted his authority.

Japan's emperor sent no troops to Korea, and in 562 Japan was forced from its possession in Korea that it called Mimana. The emperor had his doubts about the wisdom of adopting Buddhism, but he allowed the leader of the Soga clan to worship the Buddha privately as a trial. The Soga clan had been rising in influence, including marrying their daughters into the ruling Yamato family, and the Soga clan leader believed what the king of Paekche had said: that Buddhism was the religion of the most civilized. And he believed that Japan, therefore, should have it.

The Mononobe and Nakatomi succeeded in spreading hostility against Buddhism when, following the arrival of a Buddhist statue, disease spread among the Japanese. The epidemic was spoken of as a sign of the anger of the Shinto gods. The Soga temple at the palace was burned down. But this was followed by the epidemic becoming worse, which was taken as a sign of the anger and power of the Buddha. The Soga were allowed to maintain their adherence to Buddhism, and a few  Buddhist monks arrrived from Korea, adding to a small Buddhist community at the capital.

The new emperor, Yomei, who had taken power during the conflict and pestilence was impressed by Buddhism and accepted it, but he died in 587, after only a year on the throne.  That year, the Soga clan fought a civil war against the Mononobe and Nakatomi over who should succeed Yomei. The Soga won, and the head of the Soga family, Umako, made his nephew, Sujun, emperor.

Eventually Sujun wanted to be rid of his benefactor, Umako, but Umako struck first and, in 592, he had Sujun murdered. Then he placed his thirty-nine year-old daughter, Suiko, on the throne and made her twenty-nine year-old nephew, Shotoku, her regent.  Shotoku became Crown Prince. He converted Suiko to Buddhism. Buddhist monks acquired high positions in government. Buddhism became the state religion, and its powers were called upon to protect the Japanese nation. Impressed with things Chinese he imported Confucianist learning.  Also more Buddhist monasteries were built. And in the city of Heijo, now known as Nara, the statue of the Buddha was built that is still there today - while Buddhism remained limited to a few aristocrats around the capital.

The Nakatomi family continued to serve as the state's Shinto high priest. The Nakatomi were forced to tolerate Buddhism, and Shinto continued to be a part official state functions. Buddhist doctrine and Shinto began influencing each other. The Buddha, represented by the statue at Nara, became identified with the Sun Goddess of Shinto worship, and Buddhist ceremonies were woven into traditional court ritual.

The Soga family protected itself well with an army of bodyguards. They inspired rebellion against themselves by failing to maintain good relations or accommodating others around the palace, and by their arrogance and posturing.  Leading the rebellion was the head of the Nakatomi family, Nakatomi Kamatari.  In 645 the Soga were put to the sword, as fearful Soga guards abandoned their post. Nakatomi Kamatari demanded an oath of loyalty from other officials, and outside of the palace the Nakatomi  wiped away all those who showed opposition to their rule.

Having become the most influential family, the Nakatomi began selecting who among the Yamato family would be emperor - still adhering to their belief that the Yamato family was directly descended from the original king, Jimmu and Jimmu's ancestor, the Sun Goddess. The Nakatomi family continued to run daily court ceremonies. They served as the power behind the throne and occasionally as regent. They ran government ministries and married their daughters into the Yamato family.  And under Nakatomi influence the actual power of the Yamato emperor declined generally, with emperors occasionally trying to re-assert Yamato control.

The 700s and Failed Reforms

Japan, during these developments, had been growing economically, the Japanese using better tools and fertilizer, more draft animals in agriculture, and better tools in the crafts.  Better roads and a fleet of ships facilitated trade. Horses and fighting equipment continued to pour into Japan from the Asian continent. Japan was growing also in population, and they were expanding against indigenous people, including the Ainu, who, on the main island, Honshu, were overrun and pushed farther north.

The capital moved from what is now Osaka to Nara, the new emperor moving to a new palace in order to avoid the pollution of his predecessor's death. Nara was a city of about 200,000 and modeled after China's great city, Chang'an, but without Chang'an's great walls - Japan being an island nation and less worried about invading armies. At the imperial court in Nara, factionalism continued while the Nakatomi remained dominant. Various aristocrat families and Buddhist monks contended for influence under Nakatomi domination - while about about 10,000 persons in Nara worked at government jobs.

From 710 to 784 was a time of reforms. The whole of Japan (excluding areas where aborigines still lived) came under the discipline of the government in the capital.  People paid taxes to the palace in the form of a percentage of what they grew, or in textiles, labor or military service. Roads linked Nara to provincial cities, and taxes were collected more efficiently. And land reform was created designed to help the common farmer.

But the land reforms were circumvented or postponed. Aristocratic families were growing in wealth and buying more land. Buddhist temples were also amassing wealth and buying more land. Land reclamation favored the wealthy, who could afford the costs involved. Less land was available to the common farmer - repeating what had occurred in Han China. And tax exemptions were given to the most influential families.

Good works, however, were done by the Buddhists. Dedicated to serving common people, Buddhists initiated public works such as the founding charity hospitals, free clinics, free lodging houses, orphanages, and old people's homes. Perhaps the spirit of good deeds played a small role in inspiring government projects such as building bridges, excavating canals, improving irrigation, and building harbors. And Buddhism was viewed with awe for its inspiring good deeds and for its powers of magic in warding off calamity.

The Buddhists in Japan continued to see the material world as illusory, holding that reality was one's own consciousness and harmony under the Universal Buddha. But, of course, they continued to make accommodations with the material world. Buddhist monasteries had their own armies and were unscrupulous in making alliances. As readers of Chinese, some Buddhist monks became expert in administration and technical matters, such as engineering, and these monks served Japan much as the Latin reading clergy served in medieval Europe.

For common peasants calamity was, however, an overwhelming reality. Common peasants went into debt and if they could not repay their debts they were held in bondage or as slaves.  Some peasants escaped to frontier areas. Some became vagrants, and some joined other peasants in working on great estates.  The one-tenth or so of the population that became slaves were the possession of government bureaucrats, landlords and temples.  The main concern of the court nobility, meanwhile, was ritual and ceremony. There, orchestras with string and percussion instruments played. People danced and wore brilliant costumes and fanciful masks.

An emperor's daughter, succeeded to power in 749 and became known as the Empress Koken. She brought Buddhist priests into court and then abdicated in 758 on the advice of her cousin, Fujiwara Nakamaro, and she was succeeded by the emperor Junnin. Junnin was murdered, and in 764 the Empress Koken re-ascended the throne, with a new name: Empress Shotoku. She appears to have fallen in love with a Buddhist monk, Kokyo - with whom she was rumored to share the same pillow. Empress Shotoku promoted Kokyo as her chief minister.  She commissioned the printing of one million prayer charms and may have wanted to make Kokyo emperor. Nara society was shocked. The Fujiwara family stepped in and by 770 she was out of power. Soon she was dead. Henceforth women were to be exempted from imperial succession. And Buddhist monks were removed from the offices they held.

The new emperor, Kammu, wished to be free of influence from the Buddhist monasteries around Nara. In 784 he moved his court thirty-five miles northwest to Nagaoka, a new palace and royal court built there in five months by 300,000 men. To defray the expense of the move, taxes were increased, a burden felt by the peasantry.

Bad omens appeared at the new capital in the form of frequent epidemics and the death of the heir, and it was believed that his spirit had to be placated. So in 794, after only ten years at Nagaoka, the capital was moved again, to Heian-kyo - which means "Capital of Peace and Tranquility." It was another city modeled after Chang'an. Eventually, accompanying the failure of peace and tranquility, the capital was to be renamed Kyoto (pronounced KYO-toe rather than Key-oh-toe) which means "capital city."

The Fujiwara, Buddhist Emperors and Wars between Nobles

While cutting ties with Buddhism, the emperor Kammu restored the system of government laws called the Ritsu Ryo. Buddhism was now forbidden to interfere in secular government matters, but its religious functions were encouraged. Kammu ended military conscription of peasants, and he left court appointed aristocrats as leaders of his army. His army responded to raids by Ainu against Japanese incursions and it warred against the Ainu north of Sendai. The war lasted from 780 to 803. In the eyes of the Japanese, the aristocrat leader of the army, Sakanoue Tamuramaro, became the hero of that war, and he became the first who wore the title of Shogun.

Garrisons were established in Mutsu province to keep the Ainu in their place, and for the next 150 years Japan had no more wars, the emperor's army seeing little action and declining as a force. But in the early 800s, after the emperor Kammu passed from the scene, bloody fights erupted between rival cliques as to who should rule as emperor.

In 806 the new emperor was Heizei. He was apparently influenced by Confucianism and announced that good government depended on literature and that progress depended on learning. But after Haizei it was the study of Buddhism that was taking hold among the emperors. They became more interested in the inner peace and prolonged study of Buddhism than in ruling. And rather than create anything that could be called good government, they began a tradition of ruling as figureheads confined to the duties of religious ritual and various innocuous works. The government continued to be run by the Nakatomi family, which continued to benefit from its ties with the Yamato family, and the Nakatomi changed their name to Fujiwara. Occasionally the head of the imperial family would try to reassert his family's power. In the late 800s the emperor Uda, who was not born to a Fujiwara mother, tried. But the Fujiwara's remained dominant. The head of the Fujiwara family ruled as a regent, or as a prime minister after they created the office of kampaku - regent for an adult emperor. And the Fujiwara maintained their monopoly on daily government routines and religious rituals.

The Fujiwara period in Japan's history is said to have begun in 858 and to have continued to 1160.  At the emperor's court life was gay and there was devotion to the arts - while the capital's aristocrats were losing political and economic control over the rest of the country. Japan had been slowly changing economically since the 700s. Trade was increasing. In the capital, paper makers, weavers, scroll painters, smiths and other specialists were developing their skills. Competition for land and resources between the aristocratic families was on the rise. Clans were expanding their estates and defying central authority - much as the owners of estates in France were defying the authority of France's monarchs. And little defiance was necessary, as Japan's monarchy was inclined to leave the great landowning families alone.

In the 900s more wealthy landholders had freed themselves from paying taxes. The government was low on revenues and soon gave up supporting a national army.  In the countryside, the hardier aristocratic relatives of those in the capital were consolidating their various lands into single administrative units. They were recruiting disenchanted peasants, workers and soldiers and maintaining their own armed force to protect themselves against lawlessness. The men making up the armed forces on these independent lands came to be known as samurai (men who serve), or bushi (warriors). And the now militarized aristocracy began to take over in the provinces - the carrying of swords not to be outlawed by the central government until the nineteenth century.

The militarized aristocracy obtained improved military technology - horses, armor, more powerful bows and better swords. A new, medieval  Japan was in the making, its central figure a local warlord on horseback, leading his men with his bow and sword and wearing steel armor. And eventually these great landholders did what warlords and princes  had done in China, what independent states had done for millennia and what nobles were doing in Europe: they were in competition with each other. They were jealous of one another or feared each other. And they warred against each other. That which might have prevented South Dakota from warring with Kansas - a higher, centralized power - had failed to hold in Japan.

Buddhist monasteries were also large landholders, and they were expanding in size as Buddhist temples were expanding in wealth.  Buddhist estates had their own armies - armed monks called acuso. And occasionally they fought against each other, against some other expanding estate, or against the government in Kyoto.

The biggest war came in the mid-1100s when two noble families fought each other, both of them related to the Yamato royal family. One of these families was the Taira, centered by the Inland Sea. The other was the Minamoto, which had been allied with the Fujiwara family. The dispute was over who would be the next figurehead emperor. The warring was on-again and off-again for about thirty years, and the Taira family won. The Fujiwara were eclipsed for the time being. From the capital, Kyoto, the head of the Taira family ruled for ten years, appointing which Yamato family member was to be emperor. His army grabbed more land, some of it from the Buddhists. He had members of the Minamoto family hunted down and killed. But, demonstrating confidence in his power, he spared the sons of his former Minamoto rival, keeping the eldest of them hostage  at the small fishing village of Kamakura.

This eldest son, Minamoto Yorimoto, was a prisoner among relatives of the Taira family ruler, and Minamoto Yorimoto married into the ruler's extended family. Yorimoto took advantage of a new conflict over succession to organize an army of dissatisfied men, and five more years of war ensued. Yorimoto seized Kyoto and drove the Taira back to their stronghold by the Inland Sea. He  was given the title of the emperor's military deputy: shogun. He had the entire Taira family hunted down and slaughtered. And rather than stay at the capital, he returned to his base in Kamakura, from which he appeared to be in control of all Japan. It was the beginning of what was to be called the Kamakura period of Japan's history.

The Kamakura Era, to 1250

Minamoto Yorimoto's subordinates collected taxes. He held other local powers in subordination. He passed laws and appointed some men to imperial positions - while the emperor, in Kyoto, remained a figurehead, giving Yorimoto sanction for his moves and Yorimoto remained his shogun. Among Yorimoto's descendants, and in the imperial bureaucracy, sons continued to inherit their father's offices.

Government by murder survived in the succession disputes that followed Yorimoto's death in 1199. Two of Yorimoto's sons and a grandson were assassinated by another of his sons, and what had been Yorimoto's rule was taken over by his thirty-two year-old widow, Hōjō Masako. She had retired to a Buddhist nunnery and became known as the "nun-shogun." She ruled, made and unmade emperors, and presided over the expansion of the land of her family (the Hōjō) until she died in 1225.

By now, trading in commodities was developing, bringing real change. More craft persons were beginning to produce for common people and more common people were trading their produce for goods such as pottery, farm tools, pots and pans. Craft persons were making umbrellas, leather, saddles, copper products, roof tiles and weaving fabrics. Artisans and merchants were traveling more. The number of market days in a locale typically increased from maybe six a year at the beginning of the 1200s to perhaps twenty-one by the end of the century. Rice, lumber, fish, salt, sesame, dyes and other products were being transported about Japan, most of the transportation on waterways.

After the early 1200s the use of money grew. At mid-century forty or fifty Japanese ships a year arrived at southern China - during the reign of the Southern Song - and exchanged lumber, sulfur and other products for China's copper coins. In the port area where the trade took place, copper coins might vanish for awhile following the departure of the Japanese. Alarmed, the Song government responded with a decree forbidding the trading of its coins with the Japanese.  It was a part of the naiveté of those times about economics. The decree had little effect. Inspectors at China's port took bribes, and coins continued to pass to the Japanese. In Japan the naiveté about money expressed itself in people talking about the new "coin sickness," while authorities in Japan apparently failed to see the benefit in Japan minting its own coins. It was China's money that was respected, along with other things from China.

From the mid-1200s agricultural productivity increased in Japan. Rice paddies were more widely used,  including double and triple cropping in some regions. A decreasing number of paddies were lost to flooding and drought, and improvements were made in irrigation and water control.  And with the rise in agricultural productivity and the rise in commerce came a rise in population and growth in the number and size of towns.

Pure Land Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, and Bushido

Religious ferment had accompanied the rise and wars of the military aristocracies. Buddhism spread among Japan's common people, and among the Buddhists rival schools of thought contended with each other. Around the time of the wars between the Taira family and the Minamotos many Buddhists were appalled by the violence, including the violence of their fellow Buddhists who had adopted the credo of kill or be killed. Some saw the violence as having gotten so bad that too much evil existed for the possibility of attaining salvation. Some fled to China in search of enlightenment and extraordinary efforts at salvation were sought.

In Japan a movement called Pure Land Buddhism began, based on doctrines from China. Pure Land Buddhists held that they were living in a degenerate age, that salvation could be attained in a place called "the Pure Land of the West," where they could live in serenity and work on the karma of their past lives. Pure Land Buddhism taught that in heaven were good spirits - angels - who helped people, and foremost among them was the Buddha, who went by the name of Amitabha, who vowed salvation for all living creatures.  It was a salvation that could be achieved merely by faith rather than personal strength in overcoming one's weaknesses - achieved by chanting "hail to the Buddha Amida" over and over and over. Pure Land Buddhism was open to all - women and men. Pure Land Buddhism was easy to understand, and eventually it would become Japan's largest Buddhist sect.

Another form of Buddhism that developed in Japan was called Zen.  Zen originated in China, where it was called Chuan. It too demanded no intellectual effort. Chuan Buddhists saw reality as nothing more than the immediate present. For them there was no past or future (a form of obscurantism that ignored causation). Chuan monks supported themselves by menial labor and sought salvation and enlightenment through the immediacy of mystical inspiration.

In Japan, Zen Buddhists rejected the ritualism and scholasticism that had been adopted by mainstream Buddhism. Zen followers sought a return to original Buddhism, accomplished by enlightenment (satori) through spiritual and physical discipline. This included meditation and a study of insoluble problems as a way of cleansing one of a desire for theological intellectuality. Zen encouraged focus on nothingness to allow "inner truth" to surface. The hand cannot grasp itself, argued Zen masters, repeating the obscurantism of China's Chuan Buddhists.

Zen was psychological, as was the original teachings of Siddhartha Gautama. Rather than acquiring a mission in life, the adherent was encouraged to live existentially, without anxiety and with self-reliance. There was no urge to withdraw from the world of doing in what was otherwise a meaningless world - as if doing did not demand a sense of purpose or a sense of future. Zen emphasized strong character and action. It focused on the individual and saw nothing of value in institutions or philanthropy.

Zen temples were created, the first completed in 1205, at Kamakura, by the Japanese monk Eisai, who had returned from China fifteen years before. A reformist within Buddhism, Eisai had been driven from Kyoto, but at Kamakura he had acquired the patronage of the shogun and military government.  Zen mixed with samurai values in a way that became alien to Chuan Buddhism. Zen appealed to the rough and uneducated samurai. Its emphasis on focusing the mind and physical discipline was similar to the discipline used in the martial arts. Warlords advocated Zen for their troops and, as had the shogunate at Kamakura, they patronized Zen monks and  monasteries. The Zen warrior viewed life was as the Chuan Buddhists had seen it - as an illusion, with no past or future. Killing, they told themselves, was no worse than other activities, and dying was nothing. Zen samurai allowed themselves to reason (without considering it reason) that life came and went again as did the cherry blossom that was their symbol. The samurai warriors did not escape from the sense of horror in combat, but after this horror they found in Zen what they believed was a cleansing of the mind.

The samurai joined to their Buddhism elements of Taoism and Shinto and called it the "Way of the Warrior" - Bushido -  seeing the only worthy truth as a true warrior's honor. This honor included being honest, sincere, frugal, stoic, and loyal to one's landlord-commander.  Femininity was shameful and women counted for little.  Love for a woman was inferior to the pure love one was supposed to have for one's comrade-in-arms. The greatest honor was to seek death in the service of one's landlord-commander.

Not all samurai lived up to the Bushido ideal.  The samurai remained as human as others, pursuing their personal interests, their egos and paranoia and serving power where they found it in their interest to do so. When it served their personal interest, some samurai abandoned their landlord-commander.

For the Japanese, Buddhism had brought some comfort. Buddhists other than adherents of Zen had increased charity, including the founding of hospitals. But among the Buddhists of Japan - as among Christians elsewhere - the purpose of  faith was personal rather than the kind of political change that would have ended servitude and decreased conflict.

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