$Unique_ID{bob00790} $Pretitle{} $Title{History Of Religions Chapter II: Part I} $Subtitle{} $Author{Foot Moore, George} $Affiliation{} $Subject{buddhism buddhist japan sects china buddha chinese monks sect century} $Date{1913} $Log{} Title: History Of Religions Book: Religions Of Japan Author: Foot Moore, George Date: 1913 Chapter II: Part I Buddhism Introduction - Influence of China - Compromise with Shinto - Spread among the People - Monasteries and Their Feuds - Conflicts with the State - Tenets of the Sects: Shingon, Tendai, Zen - Pure Land Sects: Jodo, Shin - Salvation by Faith - Relation to Christianity - Common Characteristics - Popular Buddhism - Confucianism in Japan. In 552 A.D. the ruler of the little kingdom of Pekche, in the south-western corner of the Korean peninsula, being hard pressed by more powerful neighbours and desiring to secure Japanese support, sent to the emperor, with other presents, an image of Shaka Butsu ^1 in gold and copper, several flags and umbrellas, and a number of volumes of Sutras. In an accompanying letter, he commended the Buddhist religion as the most profitable of all faiths. [Footnote 1: The Buddha Sakyamuni. Buddhism had been introduced into northern Korea in 372 A.D. and into Pekche in 384, where it at once became the court religion.] A division of counsels arose over the question whether the new god should be worshipped or not: the chief minister, Soga, was in favour of following the fashion of all the western neighbours; other no less influential voices gave warning against provoking the anger of the native deities, the gods of heaven and earth, of the land and grain, by giving them a rival. It was thereupon decided that Soga might set up the worship himself in his own house and see what happened. A pestilence which shortly ensued was interpreted by the opponents of the foreign religion as a confirmation of their warning; Soga's temple was burned and the image thrown into a canal. A second attempt to introduce Buddhism, in 577 A.D., had a like ending. In the conflicts over the succession which followed the death of the emperor Bidatsu (586 B.C.), however, the leaders of the opposition lost their lives, and the house of Soga, which from the beginning had been favourably disposed to Buddhism, became all-powerful. Under the empress Suiko Tenno (593-628 A.D), whom the Soga raised to the throne, with the prince Shotoku Taishi as heir apparent and virtual regent, Buddhism became the religion of the court, and the nobility made haste to follow the fashion. Shotoku was a man of high character and of remarkable learning, not only in Buddhist doctrine but in Chinese literature, and he tried to instil into the governing class some of those lofty notions of official obligation and responsibility which he found in Confucius and Mencius. In the second of the seven articles of his instructions for officials he strongly commends Buddhism: "Zealously venerate the three jewels (the Triratna). The three jewels are the Buddha, the Law, and the Order. These are the last refuge of the four classes of beings and the ultimate principles of all lands. What age, what men should not honour these laws? There are but few men who are wholly bad; men can be instructed and so brought to follow the laws. How can they be rightly controlled except by refuge in the three jewels? His example and influence doubtless did as much to further the spread of Buddhism as his formal commendation. In an enumeration taken shortly after his death (621 A.D.) 46 temples were reported, with 816 priests and 569 nuns. In 607 Shotoku despatched a company of students, monks and laymen, to Loh-yang, then the capital of China, where they remained for many years, devoting themselves not only to the abstrusities of scholastic Buddhism, but to the classic ethical and political philosophy, and to Chinese methods of government. A few years after their arrival in China the Sui dynasty was overthrown (619) and the T'ang succeeded it. The second emperor of this line, T'ai Tsung (627-650), brought China to the very highest pitch of its power. His dominions extended to Persia and the Caspian Sea and to the confines of India, and under him China was "the most powerful, the most enlightened, the most progressive, and the best governed empire, not only in Asia, but on the face of the globe." He remodelled the university and other educational institutions, instituted the system of examinations which have ever since been the way into the service of the state, and undertook a new codification of the laws of the empire. The last of the Japanese students sent over by Shotoku returned to their native country in 640, having lived for a dozen years at the capital of this great monarch. They had not been long at home when they had opportunity to put their knowledge to use: the great reforms of 645 were largely directed by them. These reforms consisted essentially in a reorganisation of the whole Japanese system of government on the Chinese model. In the place of a clan system, which is often, though not quite accurately, called feudal, was erected a strongly centralised government, with eight ministerial departments, whose functions were minutely defined, and a hierarchy of officials; provision was made for the registration of the people in census lists and laws were enacted regulating the division of land, taxes, and the like. The successive codes from 662 on are framed in the same spirit; the definitive code of 702, the Taiho-ryo, was based throughout on the contemporary Chinese code, T'ang-ling, and was promulgated in the Chinese language. In short, Japan appropriated Chinese civilisation in the seventh century with more avidity and with less discrimination and independence than it manifested toward Occidental civilisation in the nineteenth century - naturally, inasmuch as in the former period there was no old and high national culture to withstand the foreign way. Schools for the study of Chinese were established by the emperor Tenchi (668-671), with foreign and native teachers, and later a university, in which instruction was given in the quadrivium, history, the Chinese classics, law, and mathematics. Buddhism seemed to be an integral part of the new civilisation - to be, in fact, its religious side. Confucianism as a moral and political philosophy was of undisputed authority in its own sphere; but the Chinese official cultus, being specifically a state religion, was not exportable. The reforming emperor, Kotoku (645-654), "honoured the religion of Buddha and despised the way of the gods" (Shinto). The second of his successors, Temmu, in 674, ordered that every house in his kingdom should have an altar for the worship of Buddha. The progress that Buddhism made in this period may be judged by the fact that in the code of 702 it was found necessary to forbid the gift or sale of lands to the temples and to prohibit monks and nuns from owning real estate individually - so rapidly were the saints inheriting the earth. This legislation proved, however, to be of as little effect as similar statutes of mortmain in Christian countries. Down to the end of the eighth century Buddhism, like the Chinese learning with which it was so intimately associated, flourished chiefly at court and in official circles; the masses remained ignorantly loyal to the faith of their fathers. A virulent epidemic of smallpox, which, starting in Kiushiu, reached the capital in 735, set all classes to propitiating the offended powers - whoever they were - or to invoking the protection of the friendly gods against the demons. The Buddhist priests did their part as experts in such business, and the emperor promised to erect a colossal statue of Buddha for deliverance from the plague. The common people resorted to the old gods for help, and as the pestilence continued to rage the thoughts of other classes also turned to them. Perhaps, as at the very introduction of Buddhism, it was feared that the deities of Japan resented the intrusion of the foreign cult. At least they must not be neglected. Gyogi, a patriarch of the Hosso sect of Buddhists, was accordingly sent to the temple of the sun goddess at Ise to present to her a relic of Buddha and to inquire how she looked upon the emperor's project of a great image of Buddha. He returned with a favourable oracle, and the following night the emperor dreamed that the goddess herself appeared to him and said, "The Sun is Biroshana," the highest deity of the national religion, Ama-terasu, thus declaring herself to be identical with Vairocana, who in some sects occupies a similar exalted station among the transcendental Buddhas. An extension of this doctrine made it easy to identify every aboriginal god with some Buddha or Buddhist saint, and served as the theological basis for the syncretism of Ryobu Shinto. ^1 [Footnote 1: See above, pp. 93 f.] The colossal Daibutsu of Nara was not successfully cast till 749; but in 737 the emperor had ordered the construction of a large monastery in each of the provinces, and later required each local government to erect a seven-storied pagoda. Under such favour it was not long before Buddhist monks began to play an ambitious role in state affairs. One of them, Dokyo, the spiritual adviser and favourite of the empress Shotoku Tenno (765-769), not content with being chancellor of the empire and ruling it through his mistress, formed the audacious plan of seating himself on the throne of the descendants of the sun goddess. The warning was not lost, and in the succeeding period, under strong rulers like Kwammu (782-805), the ecclesiastics were kept in their place. The older Buddhist sects, of which there were six before this time, had planted their principal establishments at Nara, the first permanent capital of the empire (710-784); at the new capital, Heian (Kyoto), built by Kwammu in 794, two others, more recently introduced from China, took the lead, and soon left their older rivals far behind. One of these, the Tendai, propagated in Japan in the first years of the ninth century by Saicho, better known under his posthumous name, Dengyo Daishi, covered with its monasteries Mount Hiyeizan northeast of Kyoto, which at a later time sheltered thirty or forty thousand monks. Kukai (Kobo Daishi) returned in 806 from a long residence in China, bringing with him the doctrines of the Yogacarya school, and founded the Shingon sect, whose principal seat was the monastery of Koya, south of the capital. The Tendai was much the more numerous and influential of the two, and from it most of the later Japanese sects sprang or split off. The fusion of Buddhism and Shinto for which a formula had been found by Gyogi was greatly promoted by Kobo, who taught that in ancient times the Buddhas had appeared in Japan as Kami to bless the people of the land. The Butsu and Hotoke (Buddhas and Saints), to whose worship the people were now invited, were, under other names and in fuller revelation of their nature and attributes, the same beneficent beings they had always worshipped. In consequence of this benevolent assimilation, Buddhist images were set up in Shinto fanes and native Kami, rebaptised, were worshipped in Buddhist temples. The barriers being thus thrown down, Buddhism made rapid progress among the common people. Many things contributed to this success: its gods, so much more human than the vague Shinto Kami - gods not only habitually well disposed to men, but the very embodiment of an infinite compassion - the splendid cultus, which all the arts conspired to make beautiful and impressive; the voluminous scriptures, enveloped in the mystery of a strange tongue; the repute of its priesthood for learning and holiness; the higher morality they preached; the power they had over this world by their supernatural attainments or arts; and their possession of the secrets of the other world and the assurance they offered of a blessed hereafter - all this had its full effect now that Buddhism came not as a foreign rival of the native faith but as Shinto itself unfolded; the common man was Shintoist and Buddhist at once, unconscious of the duality. One great field, however, Buddhism had to itself, namely, death and the future life, for here Shinto had nothing to say: heavens and hells, with all the fears and hopes that they excite, were beyond its primitive horizon. The emperors, without ever renouncing their place as chief priests of the native religion or suffering its rites to fall into complete desuetude, were in their personal faith Buddhists. Several of them in the succeeding centuries laid aside their state and assumed the monk's tonsure to find peace from a world of trouble in the seclusion of the cloister, or to pull the strings of government from behind the scenes. ^1 Monasteries and temples multiplied and grew rich, thousands entered the order from worldly motives, many of the monks were ignorant and lazy, some were vicious - a parallel to the contemporary history of Christian monasticism. [Footnote 1: Beginning with Shirakawa's retirement in 1086, there was a succession of cloistered emperors, who down to 1156 were generally the real rulers of Japan.] The religious establishments were frequently at strife with one another, and settled their controversies over points of doctrine or more worldly issues by force and arms. Before the end of the tenth century the abbot of Hiyeizan had organised a regular body of mercenary soldiers in the service of the monastery, and so illustrious and menacing an example was promptly followed by other powerful ecclesiastics. The monasteries were turned into fortresses, fitted to defy not only the assaults of their rivals in religion but the authority of the state. By the close of the eleventh century any one of the great monastic foundations could put into the field a force of several thousand men - hireling bravos, retainers from the wide estates of the church, novices, and tonsured monks. Private wars were frequent. The two chief Tendai monasteries, Hiyeizan and its daughter Miidera, on the shores of Lake Biwa, were always at enmity. The occasions of their quarrels were rivalry for places of power, the nomination of abbots in dependent establishments, rights of precedence, the conduct of court ceremonies. In 1082 the army of Hiyeizan took Miidera, stripped its shrines of their treasures, and burnt it to the ground. The same thing happened again forty years afterward and once again in the latter part of the century; while Hiyeizan was at least once burned by Miidera. The other sects and minor monasteries had their own smaller broils. In fact, there was hardly a decade in that anarchic period when such struggles were not going on among the bellicose saints. They sometimes undertook to intimidate the secular rulers, as when in 1039, three thousand Hiyeizan monks, complaining of the regent's distribution of ecclesiastical preferment, marched into Kyoto and besieged him in his palace. Over and over again the capital was thrown into a panic by an invasion of turbulent monks. In the civil wars of the period between the Taira and the Minamoto, the armies of the church took an active part, and on more than one field proved themselves as hard fighters and as ruthless victors as the doughtiest knights. As in Europe from the eleventh to the thirteenth century the growing worldliness of the older monastic orders led to the establishment of numerous new orders all aiming at a restoration of faith and morals, so in Japan the rise of four new Buddhist sects in the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth centuries shows that, however far the orders had declined from their primitive virtue, the recuperative power of the religion was by no means exhausted. The parallel can, unfortunately, be carried a step farther: in Buddhist Japan as in Christian Europe the reforming orders soon succumbed more or less completely to the influence of environment and example and followed in the footsteps of their predecessors. One of these, the Zen (Sanskrit Dhyana), or Contemplative, sect, was founded by Eisai, a monk from Hiyeizan, who went to China to study about 1168, and after a second visit in 1187 erected a Zen shrine at Hakata, whence he removed in 1202 to Kyoto. A typhoon which devastated the capital three years later was interpreted by the monks of the older orders as a judgment on the city for harbouring this heresy, and the emperor expelled the heresiarch. Eisai thereupon betook himself to Kamakura, where he won to the new doctrine the powerful Hojo family, and where the famous "Five Temples" were for long the chief seats of the sect. Besides this older Rinzai branch of the Zen-shu, another school, the Soto, was introduced in 1223 by Dogen, and a third, the Obaku, about 1650. "Contemplation" is not the way of salvation that would be expected to commend itself most to the belligerent gentry whose hands were more wonted to the sword than the beads; but the paradox is fact, the Zen variety of Buddhism was especially favoured by the military class. After all, this is not so strange, for in the comtemplative scheme of salvation as interpreted by this sect neither learning nor retirement from the world was necessary; the great thing was to discover the essential Buddha in man's own heart. The Jodo sect, founded in 1175 by Genku, and the Shin, an offshoot from it, founded by his disciple Shinran about 1224, are of a different type from all the rest. Salvation is in them not achieved by man's own striving in the "Holy Way," but is bestowed by the grace of Amida Buddha on those who call upon him in faith. This way of admission to the "Pure Land" soon became very popular. Emperors patronised it, and in the first zeal of its evangelisation it won multitudes of the common people, who had hitherto been only superficially influenced by Buddhism. This strange doctrine not only aroused vigorous opposition from the side of the older sects, but provoked Nichiren to found (1252 A.D.) a new one, more reactionary and intolerant than all the rest, which bears the founder's name, and has perpetuated to this day his intransigeant spirit. The success of the new sects brought them large endowments, and with wealth came the lust of the flesh and the pride of life. Their abbots were great feudal lords, some of them having whole provinces for their feoffs; one of them could even dream of making himself master of all Japan. Like their older rivals, they fortified their monasteries, and often took the field in secular as well as ecclesiastical commotions. In the turbulent time from the middle of the fourteenth to the middle of the sixteenth century the monks were a formidable evil. Not the smallest part of the great task of Nobunaga and his coadjutors and successors in restoring order and authority in Japan was the crushing of the church militant. To his soldiers, hesitating from religious scruples, Nobunaga said: "If I do not destroy them now, this trouble will be everlasting. Moreover, these priests violate their vows; they eat fish and stinking vegetables, keep concubines, and never unroll the sacred books. How can they be vigilant against evil or maintain the right? Surround their dens and burn them, and suffer none within them to live." His orders were carried out: the three thousand monastic buildings that studded Mount Hiyeizan were destroyed and thousands of monks perished. The Monto monastery at Osaka, under its abbot, Kennio, proved more difficult. Repeated assaults on it were repulsed with great loss, and Nobunaga with sixty thousand men had to sit down to a regular siege. It was more than four years from the investment to the surrender; and at the end the monks set fire to the monastery as they evacuated it, and left the captor only a heap of smoking ruins. A year before Nobunaga had decided a dispute between the Jodo and the Nichiren by decapitating the leading disputants of the latter sect and deporting many more to desert islands. The Jesuit missionaries who witnessed these events wrote home: "This man seems to have been chosen by God to open and prepare the way for our holy faith, without knowing what he was doing." They underestimated the intelligence of the Japanese leaders if they dreamed that they were going to allow foreign ecclesiastics to build up a power which was bound to be more dangerous to the state than the native bonzes. Hideyoshi's edict of expulsion was issued in 1587, the first of a series of progressively drastic measures against Christianity which succeeded within half a century in virtually extirpating it. In the suppression of the intruding faith Buddhism was a useful instrument, and the Tokugawa shoguns made good use of it. To escape the severe laws against Christianity, every man had to prove that his name was inscribed in the parish register of a Buddhist temple. The rulers themselves were attached to the Jodo branch of the "Pure Land" school, and this sect with its daughter, the Shin-shu, took the lead among the sects, while the Zen declined from the importance it had enjoyed in the preceding period. But if the Tokugawa rulers patronised the church, they also put it under the supervision and control of the state. Iyemitsu prescribed the conditions - including an examination - on which priests might be ordained, the period of study before one might set up for a preacher or found a temple, the way in which intestine disputes in a sect were to be decided, and the like. Notwithstanding the favoured situation of the church - or because of it - the Buddhist clergy of this period cannot be given a very good name for either learning or virtue. Monks who strictly observed the rule of the order were few; the great mass was lazy and ignorant, if nothing worse; simony was rife. The priesthood throve on the superstitions of the people; they had magical powers for all purposes, and above all, the destiny of the dead was in their hands. The better educated among the military class held them in contempt, and found more edification in the Neoconfucian philosophy of the Sing-li school. The intellectual and moral decay of Buddhism also turned the minds of Mabuchi and his successors to the revival of Pure Shinto. ^1 [Footnote 1: See above, pp. 94, 113 f.] It has been remarked in an earlier chapter that in the decadence of Buddhism in China the numerous schools and sects which once flourished there have run together into one composite type, in which the doctrines and methods of the Dhyana, or Contemplative, school predominate, though no other variety of Mahayanist salvation is excluded. In Japan, on the contrary, the great schools which were introduced from China in the ninth and following centuries have not only maintained their separate individuality but kept up their sectarian controversies, and the books of the old sects which have long been extinct continue to be studied as part of the history of Buddhist doctrine. Consequently, while libraries of Chinese monasteries commonly contain only such works as are regarded as of actual importance, in Japan the greater part of the voluminous canon of northern Buddhism has been preserved, together with a multitude of commentaries, treatises, and controversial writings by Chinese and Japanese authors. The canonical literature is mainly in Chinese translation; but some copies of Sanskrit originals have also been recovered. In the modern revival of Buddhist learning in Japan, native scholars have turned with new zeal to the study of this literature and have done much to make it known to Western students. A history of Buddhist schools or sects does not fall within the scope of the present survey; it must suffice to give a brief account of some of the more typical varieties. Of the so-called "old sects" which flourished in the Nara period (710-784) the most influential was the Hosso, or Dharmalakshana. The fundamental text-book of this school was the Yogacarya-bhumi of Asanga, an Indian monk who lived in the fifth century of our era. In contrast to the Madhyamika of Nagarjuna, represented by the contemporary San-ron school, Asanga postulates the reality of individual personality and of the external world, approximating thus to the Sankhya philosophy. ^1 In this sect the worship of Gautama Buddha (Sakyamuni) was pushed into the background by that of Maitreya, the future Buddha, who was supposed to have revealed its shastras. The great apostle of Asanga's doctrine in China was the famous traveller Hiuen Tsang, who brought its scriptures from India; it was introduced into Japan shortly after 653 A.D., and through another channel fifty years later. It was a patriarch of this sect, as will be remembered, who happily discovered the identity of Shinto and Buddhism in the "two-fold way of the gods." Like the rest of the "old sects," the Hosso was supplanted or absorbed in the Middle Ages by more popular successors. [Footnote 1: See below, pp. 307 f.] The Shingon sect was introduced from China, as has already been noted, in 806 A.D., by Kukai (Kobo). Its name, "The True Word," does not refer to the speculative system, but to its possession of the efficacious word (mantras, magical formulas). In China it is called "the secret doctrine of Yoga," Yoga being here the magical side of religion. The first patriarch of the sect in China was Vajrabodhi (719 A.D.). The Shingon doctrines have been not inaptly described as a Buddhist gnosticism. They distinguish an exoteric and an esoteric teaching; by way of the latter it is possible even in this earthly body composed of the six elements to attain the absolute knowledge which is Nirvana, or, in other words, to become Buddha. The supreme being in this system, the Dharmakaya, is Vairocana, one of the Dhyani (Contemplative) Buddhas of the Mahayana. He is the great sun, around whom are grouped four other Dhyani Buddhas; each of these Buddhas has as satellites a group of Bodhisattvas; these in turn have their satellites, and so on in infinitum. To the four Buddhas who surround Vairocana belong Shaka (Sakyamuni) - who thus occupies a wholly subordinate place in the system - and Amida, of whom there will be much to say later. Cabalistic diagrams illustrate the constitution of this "diamond world," or ideal world, as well as that of the "matrix," in which Vairocana is the centre and source from which the phenomenal world is evolved, the first emanations being eight Buddhas who form the petals of a lotus. ^1 To attain the supreme enlightenment it is necessary to ascend step by step ten rounds of a ladder of thought, which, originally corresponding to different classes of beings, was adapted by Kobo to the various sects, the highest, the stage of mystic enlightenment in which man recognises for the first time the source of his own thought and while still in the body becomes Buddha, being attained only by followers of the Shingon. The practical methods of achieving the great end are an adaptation and development of the Indian Yoga, as on its speculative side the doctrine returns to a pantheistic type of Brahmanism. [Footnote 1: Amida is the only one of the four Buddhas of the diamond world who reappears in the matrix system.] The belief that mental operations are efficient causes of phenomena - in other words, that a man who has acquired the method can bring about desired results merely by thinking them - though not peculiar to this school, is peculiarly prominent in it. This power can be exerted for the benefit of the dead as well as the living: the Yoga school is credited with the invention of the masses for the dead so generally used in China and Japan, in which the priest thinks that the gates of hell open, the souls throng forth from their prison, the food of the gods rains upon them, and the Buddhas descend to deliver them - thus by the power of thought really saving souls. The efficacy of thought is fortified by the recitation of magical formulas (dharanis or mantras), by magical figures made with the fingers or hands (mudras), and by passes with a magic wand supposed to represent the thunderbolt (vajra), actually a small bell with a handle. In its temple service the Shingon is the ritualistic high church of Buddhism, a supernatural virtue being attributed to the performance of the liturgy as in all "high" churches.